Changes

The Christmas-carnival period is a time when Poles eat particularly large amounts of bigos -- – assorted meats that are chopped up and stewed for hours with sauerkraut and shredded cabbage. It's a dish that you can prepare in amble quantity in advance, then freeze it (formerly, by simply storing it outside; today, in a freezer) and then reheat it multiple times, which -- – it is known -- – only improves the flavour. Bigos (pronounced ''<small>BEE</small>-gawss'') is commonly regarded one of the top dishes in the Polish culinary canon; one would be hard pressed to name a more typically Polish food. This is how American food historian William Woys Weaver described it:

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.

A 1621 Polish-Latin-Greek dictionary defines ''bigos'' simply as ''ferculum ex concisis carnibus'', or "a dish of chopped meat" and provides the word ''siekanka'' ("something chopped up") as a Polish synonym. It also gives ''minutal'' as the Latin equivalent. As it turns out, Poles were not the first to enjoy sweet-and-sour chopped-meat delicacies; there were already known to ancient Romans. We can find some recipes for minutal ''De Re Coquinaria'' (''On the Subject of Cooking''), a cookbook that has been traditionally credtied to Apicius, but is in fact a collection of formulae from various authors compiled in the 4th--5th 4th–5th centuries CE. What follows is a recipe for ''minutal ex praecoquis'', or chopped pork with apricots.

And now it's time for my own interpretation of a 17th-century recipe for a genuine Old Polish bigos -- – without meat and without cabbage! I've started by cutting a cod fillet into bite-sized morsels and marinated them in a mixture of olive oil, apple vinegar, lime juice, honey, cinnamon and nutmeg. The least Old Polish element in this mix was honey, which I used instead of sugar, the favourite sweetener of the Polish nobles of yore. On the next day, I removed the fish from the marinade and baked it in an oven.

In my next post we're going to see how bigos -- – finally, with cabbage! -- – kept evolving beyond its Old Polish stage.