stew [ME] When stew entered the language it referred to a cauldron or large cooking pot, not to what was being cooked in it. The source was Old French estuve, probably based on Greek tuphos ‘smoke or steam’, which is also where the fevers typhus [M17th] and typhoid [M17th] come from, because they create the kind of stupor that is associated with smoke inhalation. The verb ‘to stew’ originally referred to bathing in a hot bath or steam bath. It was not long before the idea of heating people in a bath had changed to heating food in an oven, specifically cooking a dish of meat and vegetables by simmering it slowly in a closed vessel. Stifle [LME] probably comes from the same Old French root, and stove [ME], originally a ‘sweating room’ in a steam bath, may be related. See also seethe.