estuver

Old French estuver (also estover) meant 'to bathe in steam' or 'to stew in a hot bath,' from Vulgar Latin *extufare, possibly related to Greek typhos, 'steam' or 'smoke.' The earliest meaning in English, borrowed around the 13th century, was a heated room — a steam bath or a hot-air bath. The leap from bathing people in steam to bathing food in hot liquid was short and inevitable.

By the 14th century, 'stew' described both the cooking method and the dish it produced. The technique was universal across medieval Europe: tough meat, root vegetables, water or ale, and hours of slow heat in a pot hung over or beside a fire. Peasants stewed because they had to — the cheapest cuts of meat required the longest cooking. The method was born from poverty and became a comfort.

The word's bathhouse meaning survived in unexpected ways. 'Stews' in medieval London referred to bathhouses along Southwark's Bankside — and those bathhouses were often brothels. 'The stews' became a euphemism for the red-light district. Henry VIII closed the Southwark stews in 1546. The culinary meaning outlived the scandalous one, and most English speakers have no idea that 'stew' once meant a place where people went to do things that had nothing to do with carrots.

English stew became a catch-all for slow-cooked, liquid-based dishes worldwide: Irish stew, Brunswick stew, Hungarian goulash (which is a stew, despite what Hungarians will tell you about the name). The word traveled from Vulgar Latin steam rooms through French bathhouses through medieval English kitchens to every slow-cooker and Dutch oven in the modern world. The steam is still there, trapped under the lid.