Slumgullion

Our Personal History With Slumgullion

I am often asked about the name. No! I don't know what it means. It was a dish our Dad frequently made for "us kids," my sister and I, and we just loved it. When we asked our father what it was called, he said it was ragout. That was fine for awhile until we had some real ragout. Then we kids wanted to know which was which. Thinking a bit, my dad said that it was really slumgullion (a name we believed at the time he just made up then and there) and we have called it that, ever wondering what it meant, ever since. If you are interested in what I have found about slumgullion over the years, Slumgullion ala Dad has been one of my favorites as well as a favorite of my own son. I hope that will become a favorite of yours as well. And maybe one day we will know the real meaning of Slumgullion.

From Merriam-Webster:

Slumgullion may not sound like the most appetizing name for a dish, but that’s part of its charm. The word’s etymology doesn’t do it any favors: "slumgullion" is believed to be derived from "slum," an old word for "slime," and "gullion," an English dialectical term for "mud" or "cesspool." The earliest recorded usage of "slumgullion," in Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872), refers not to a stew but a beverage. The sense referring to the stew debuted about two decades later, and while there is no consensus on exactly what kinds of ingredients are found in it, that’s the "slumgullion" that lives on today.

From the GRAMMARIST:

Slumgullion and goulash are two words that are sometimes used interchangeably, but in reality have a difference in meaning. We will look at the definitions of the words slumgullion and goulash, where the words come from and some examples of their use in sentences. A slumgullion is a stew, usually made up of whatever is at hand but containing at least component of meat. The word slumgullion is an American word first seen in print in the 1870s in the story Roughin’ It by Mark Twain. However, in the story, slumgullion referred to a nasty, watery beverage. The first known use of the word slumgullion occurred in 1849, it was used by miners in the California gold rush to describe the muddy slurry left behind after washing gold through a sluice. By the turn of the twentieth century, slumgullion was used to describe a weak, tasteless stew. Today, there are many different recipes called slumgullion as the name does not actually have a culinary background.

Goulash is a Hungarian stew made with meat, vegetables, paprika and various other spices. Goulash may be traced back to the ninth century when shepherds cooked stews in sheep stomachs. There are various recipes for goulash. What they all have in common is paprika. The word goulash is sometimes used figuratively to mean a jumble or a hodgepodge.

Examples But on Saturdays, his grandfather would slide into the kitchen and whip up a dish called slumgullion. (Democrat & Chronicle) But where I was concerned, it was Gaga’s Hungarian goulash—cubed chuck simmered for the length of an autumn afternoon along with carrots and sliced potatoes, blanketed in a rich tomato-and-paprika gravy the color of Crayola Burnt Umber—or nothing. (The Wall Street Journal) Explanations of the timing of the rut, the quirky and contradictory behavior deer exhibit, and the possible role of lunar phases and weather in triggering the rut have been debated for decades and created a goulash of myth, science, legend and folklore surrounding the rut. (The Toledo Blade)

From World Wide Words:

The word sounds vaguely unpleasant, a good example of form matching meaning, since Americans have for more than for 150 years used it for a variety of things that are unpleasant to various degrees. Dictionaries often say this was its first appearance in print: Then he poured for us a beverage which he called “Slum gullion,” and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler. Roughing It, by Mark Twain, 1872. A slang dictionary two years later defined slumgullion as “any cheap, nasty, washy beverage”. Another, roughly contemporary, memory is this: The meals are all alike — a potato, a slice of something like bacon, some gray stuff called bread, and a cup of muddy, semi-liquid coffee like that which the California miners call “slickers” or “slumgullion.” Travels in Alaska, by John Muir, 1915, describing a trip he made in 1879. Today it means a cheap stew made by throwing anything handy into a pot with water and boiling it, an improvised dish which has had many other names, such as Mulligan stew and Irish stew. Other senses in dictionaries include fish offal or the waste from processing whale carcasses (in Moby-Dick, which was published in 1851, Herman Melville called it “slobgollion”). We now know the word is a good deal older than the Mark Twain book. Many early examples refer to yet another old sense listed in the dictionaries, for the muddy waste left after washing gold ore in a mining sluice. Were those who were instrumental in wilfully creating this unconstitutional debt the only holders of the scrip and were compelled to shovel tailings and clean reservoirs half full of slumgullion until it was paid, or the assurance given that it would be, I for one would keep them doing penance for their sin. Placerville Mountain Democrat (California), 3 Jan. 1857. Tailings are ore residues. From this and other appearances, including the diaries of forty-niners, it seems certain that the word originated in this sense in the California gold fields, probably around 1850. It may well be the same word as Melville’s (the similarity in form is persuasive), suggesting that miners borrowed it from an older unrecorded word that also provided Melville with his version. Many of the early miners were sailors, after all, including the crews of whaling vessels, who jumped ship in San Francisco harbour when news of the strike arrived. The word would have been a good one for the muddy mess left by their improvised extraction techniques. They later applied slumgullion figuratively and disparagingly to foodstuffs that were muddy or semi-liquid. American dictionaries guess that it may be a combination of slum, an old English term meaning slime (nothing to do with a squalid urban area, the word for which is an old bit of slang of unknown origin) plus gullion, English dialect for mud or a cesspool. This is still known in Scots and is probably from the Irish goilín for a pit or pool.