Meaning
To be left to suffer the unpleasant consequences of your own actions without help, comfort, or intervention from anyone else; usually said of someone fretting over a mess of their own making, most often in the frame 'leave someone to stew in their own juice'. Informal to neutral; often unsympathetic, since the speaker is usually withholding help on purpose. Regional use: General English.
Origin
A cooking metaphor with a long pedigree: meat fried or braised in the fat and liquid it itself releases stands for the consequences of one's own making. The earliest form is medieval - Chaucer has the Wife of Bath boast that she made her husband fry 'in his owene grece', in his own grease - and reference works trace the family through 'fry in one's own grease', then 'stew in one's own grease', softening into 'stew in one's own juice(s)'. The exact modern wording is documented from Thackeray's novel The Newcomes (1854), and the phrase was well established by the mid-1800s. The story that Otto von Bismarck coined it during the 1870-71 siege of Paris, when he said he would let the French stew, is a misattribution: he spoke a German equivalent and journalists mapped his sentiment onto an English phrase already on record sixteen years before the war.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- fry in your own grease
- leave someone to stew in their own juice
- let them stew
- stew in your own gravy
- stew in your own juices
Usage Examples
- She ignored three reminders about the deadline, so her manager simply let her stew in her own juice.
- Rather than bail him out again, the board decided he could stew in his own juices for a while.
- You arranged the deal without consulting us, so you can stew in your own juice when the auditors call.