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I'm sorry to report that etymologists agree: this epitome of Polish cuisine is referred to by a word of foreign, non-Slavic and -- what's even worse -- German origin! They are not certain, though, which German word exactly the Polish ''bigos'' derives from, but they have no doubt that some German word it is. Aleksander Brückner, a famous prewar scholar of Slavic languages, maintained that ''bigos'' comes from German ''Bleiguss'', or "lead mold". The idea was that if you pour molten lead on water (as many Poles still do with wax for divination on Saint Andrew's Eve) , you 're going to get a shape that resembles bigos. Other linguists are quite unanimous in their view that this etymology makes no God-damned sense.

Suggestions that are somewhat more logical from a culinary point of view include the archaic German verb ''becken'', "to chop", and the Old German noun ''bîbôz'' (or ''Beifuss'' in modern parlance), which refers to mugwort, a plant once used for seasoning. Others propose the Italian ''bigutta'', or "pot for cooking soup", which supposedly entered Polish via German. But the etymology thought to be most likely is that ''bigos'' derives from ''bîgossen'', an archaic form of the participle ''beigossen'', from the verb ''beigießen'', "to pour". To make a long story short, bigos is something to which someone (probably some German) has added some kind of liquid.