Changes

Which itself, is the saying, will in ones one's mouth hop;

But if we moved back to the times closer to those of the trilogy's characters, we would see that you could have eaten bigos with sauerkraut – but the kraut would be at best a side dish rather than an actual ingredient of the bigos! Let's take, for instance, an 17th-century epigram by Wacław Potocki about a Polish nobleman, who went empty-bellied to a banquet hosted by an Italian and returned home just as hungry. By the way, his misadventure is reminiscent of an old anecdote about a Pole who cut his stay in Italy short, because he was afraid that, if the he had been treated to grass in the summer, then he would be fed hay in the winter.<ref>{{Cyt

Why is this funny? Because the roles were reversed and lo, the lord is having leftovers from his own servants' table. Leftovers of what, exactly, do we have here? On the one hand, there's the simple, rustic dish of pork fatback stewed in sauerkraut. As we can see, the idea stewing meat and animal fat in pickled cabbage was not entirely unknown – only it wasn't referred to as ''bigos''! On the other hand, we've got something that did, in fact, go by the name of ''bigos'' and it was chopped veal that was probably seasoned sour, spicy and sweet, in line with the culinary trends of the time. This one was a more excquisiteexquisite, and more expensive, dish; fit for the lordly table and known from cookbooks written at magnate courts. How did it end up on the servants' table, then? Perhaps as leavings from their lord's earlier meal. In this case, the hungry and humiliated protagonist would have been reduced to eating leftovers from leftovers! In the meal made from these scraps, was the sauerkraut still a separate dish that was served as a side to the veal bigos, or was everything mixed up together and reheated in a single pot? Potocki gives no answer to this question, but if it was the latter, then perhaps this is how bigos as we know it today was invented?

''Bigos hultajski'' also makes an appearance in the title of a four-decades-younger novel by Tytus Szczeniowski (published under the ''nom de plume'' Izasław Blepoński), ''Bigos Hultajski, or Social Poppycock'' (''Bigos hultajski: Bzdurstwa obyczajowe''). It's not really a novel in the modern sense, but rather a loose collection of stories, drafts, digressions, polemics and sociological conjectures, arranged into a plot wihout without a beginning or an ending. Apparently, the only thing the binds its four volumes together is a series of four forewords (and one "hindword"), which are incidentally considered the most interesting part of the entire work.<ref>{{Cyt

| This novel is a messy mixture of everything, {{...}} just a scaffold thrown to the wind, to hold images haphazardly hung thereupon {{...}} All bizarrely entangled and without any logic {{...}} Such will be this book, full of repetitions, chatter and descriptions that fell off the pen wherever they happened to be nugded nudged by my imagination; this why I've entitled it Bigos Hultajski, wich which is made from a variety of things. It's a poor man's dish, but a savoury one; and perhaps it will be said of this novel that it is a poor man's roman and an unsavoury one.

By the time when Mickiewicz wrote ''Pan Tadeusz'', or the early 1830s, ''bigos hultajski'' must had become so popular that it supplanted all other, older, kinds of bigos. Then it could finally drop the disparaging epithet and become, simply, bigos. Every self-respecting Polish cookbook writer of the 19th century could not neglect to include a few recipes for sauerkraut bigos in her works – including the great (both figuratively and literally) Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa. Below, I quote a recipe written doen by one of here her most loyal fans – Bolesław Prus (today remembered as a great novelist and somewhat less remembered as a columinstcolumnist).

Unfortunately, not everything that tastes good is good for your health. Bigos happens to have the reputation of a being an excessively high-fat dish that tends to sit heavy on the stomach. What's more, it is usually made from leftovers, which has often aroused suspicions as to the freshness of its ingredients. You can see it, for example, in ''The Good Soldier Švejk'' by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, where, on the one hand, one should be glad that "''bikoš'' cooked in the Polish way" made a career as an important part of the Austro-Hungarian army's diet on the Galician front, but, on the other had, it was accused by Lieutenant Dub of giving him diarrheadiarrhoea.

Which Forefather Piast the Wheelright Wheelwright used to spew,

Because on the Vistula, we have grown farfat

| As you can see, the constitution is as unbalanced and vague, its language as sloppy, as sloppy are the minds of the MPs. On a general note, I've got to tell you that this sloppy language makes our constitution somewhat akin to paltry bigos made from rotten ham, half-rotten fatback and half-cured sauerkraut; so that each paragraph and article may and should be read completely on its own, without linking it with any other article. Naturally, the rotten ham is for the president, the half-rotten fatback is for the cabinet, and the paraliament parliament is left with the half-cured sauerkraut. As you can see, there's nothing their stomachs can do and what comes out is stench, so that all of Wiejska Street [where the Polish parliament is located] reeks. And the only way out of this chaos is to rewrite the constitution in a decent way. What's more, nobody has the right to interpret the constitution. Interpretation is forbidden – so the state is left with nothing but bigos.

For good or ill, bigos seems to fit the Polish soul and Polish history so well, then that you can feel Makuszyński's disappointment when he realizes that another dish will make a better metaphor of a phenomenon he just observed in the Polish society.

That would be some loud cheer! But an even greater curiosity is that, while you can find quite a few descriptions of this tradition in the Internet (mostly in Polish, though), they all sound quite similar (usually not longer than one or two sentences) and, what's more, none of them cites any source of this information. But if it's really a time-honoured tradition, then it surely msut must have been mentioned in some old books, right?

Still, I've been unable to find any mention of the "bigos with a cheer" in pre-Internet sources. You could say, of course, that I could have asked some of those people who wrote or talked about it. Well, I tried, but to no avail. It would turn out that either the source has escaped that person's memory or the that it's simply a fact so obvious that no citations are necessary. Besides, you can find information about bigos with a cheer everywhere; just grab any 19th-century cookbook that comes at hand. It is true that old recipes do mention a method of cooking where the pot is sealed with dough. Ćwierczakiewiczowa advises to cook the "English meatloaf" in such a way,<ref>{{Cyt

| Old Polish cuisine, especially at hunts, knew bigos with a cheer, in which the pre-cooked dish was reheated in a pot with its cover tightly sealed with dough. A loud "explosion" of the cover caused by the pressure meants meant that the dish was ready for consumption.

It's possible, of course, that the source does exist and that this quaint method of cooking bigos was actually practised. So if you remember having read about it somewhere, then I will be very grateful for a bibliographic reference. Or may be maybe you prepare bigos in this way yourself and would like to share your personal experience with cheereing cheering bigos in the comment section below?

}}, Biblioteka Kórnicka Polskiej Akademii Nauk, rkps manuscript 711, kf. 122; cyt. wquoted in: {{Cyt