Difference between revisions of "Epic Cooking: The Wondrous Taste of Bigos"
Line 18: | Line 18: | ||
== Hunter's Bigos == | == Hunter's Bigos == | ||
− | The Polish word ''bigos'' is often rendered into English as "hunter's stew", but in fact, hunter's bigos, or ''bigos myśliwski'' (pronounced: ''{{small|BEE}}-gawss mish-{{small|LEEF}}-skee''), is just one of its many varieties. Whether it's a kind of bigos made | + | The Polish word ''bigos'' is often rendered into English as "hunter's stew", but in fact, hunter's bigos, or ''bigos myśliwski'' (pronounced: ''{{small|BEE}}-gawss mish-{{small|LEEF}}-skee''), is just one of its many varieties. Whether it's a kind of bigos made from game meats or simply bigos eaten by hunters, but made from any kind of meat, is open to debate. As for me, I've never really understood why anyone would enjoy shooting at terrified animals, but if Poland's national bard himself (even if he admitted to be "a wretched marksman"<ref>Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book IV, verse 43</ref>) wrote so much about hunting in his epic, then let's at least quote a short excerpt, which is still quite up-to-date and may not be appreciated by the pro-hunting lobby in Poland. |
[[Plik:Koncert Wojskiego.jpg|thumb|The Tribune's Horn Performance, a hunting scene from ''Pan Tadeusz'' illustrated by Michał Elwiro Andriolli (1881)]] | [[Plik:Koncert Wojskiego.jpg|thumb|The Tribune's Horn Performance, a hunting scene from ''Pan Tadeusz'' illustrated by Michał Elwiro Andriolli (1881)]] |
Revision as of 15:13, 2 March 2019
Bigos is yum! |
In this post I'm going to continue about the history of bigos, the Polish nation dish, and also return to Pan Tadeusz, the Polish national epic. We've already talked about what the protagonists of Pan Tadeusz used to have for breakfast, but we omitted back then the hunters' breakfast in Book IV of the poem. That one took the form of a picnic, out in the woods, shared by a group of hunters who had just successfully concluded a bear hunt (although the bear itself was shot by Father Worm, who disappeared a moment later).
Hunter's Bigos
The Polish word bigos is often rendered into English as "hunter's stew", but in fact, hunter's bigos, or bigos myśliwski (pronounced: BEE-gawss mish-LEEF-skee), is just one of its many varieties. Whether it's a kind of bigos made from game meats or simply bigos eaten by hunters, but made from any kind of meat, is open to debate. As for me, I've never really understood why anyone would enjoy shooting at terrified animals, but if Poland's national bard himself (even if he admitted to be "a wretched marksman"[1]) wrote so much about hunting in his epic, then let's at least quote a short excerpt, which is still quite up-to-date and may not be appreciated by the pro-hunting lobby in Poland.
The Count is well versed in the lore of the chase, |
— , księga II, wersy 578–591 |
Anyway, after the hunt was over, the hunters (who had left home early in the morning with empty stomachs) treated themselves to a feast in the midst of the forest. Fires were built, "meats, vegetables, flour" and bread "were brought from the wagons",[2] Judge Soplica "opened a box full of flagons" of Goldwasser[3] (a herbal liqueur from Danzig, or Gdańsk, famous for the gold flakes added to every bottle), while "in the pots warmed the bigos."[4] Pan Tadeusz contains what is without a doubt the most beautiful literary monument to this Polish national dish. Or maybe bigos is considered a national dish because it is mentioned in Pan Tadeusz? Whatever the case, Mickiewicz himself admitted that he didn't quote know how to describe what bigos actually tastes like.
Mere words cannot tell |
— ibid., Book IV, verses 831–834 |
You may remember from my previous post that sauerkraut was merely optional, and usually absent, in Old Polish bigos. In Mickiewicz's version, though, it was already an indispensable ingredient of the recipe.
Pickled cabbage comes foremost, and properly chopped, |
— ibid., Book IV, verses 839–845 |
Rascal's Bigos
thumb|Cabbage heads being chopped into bigos So when, how and why did sauerkraut become part of bigos? For example, to Henryk Sienkiewicz, a turn-of-the-20th-century writer and Nobel-Prize winner, sauerkraut in bigos was so obvious that he assumed it must have been just as obvious to Lord John Humphrey Zagloba, a character from his trilogy of historical novels.
"How are you, old rogue? Why twist your nose as if you had found some unvirtuous odor?" |
— Translation based on |
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 short his stay in Italy, because he was afraid that, if the had been treated to grass in the summer, then he would be fed hay in the winter.[5] The nobleman in Potocki's poem, after a feast of spinach, celery, asparagus and artichokes, craved to eat his full of meat at last.
My servants have just lunched. "Have you left any food?" |
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 excquisite, 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 of 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?
This is the kind of bigos that the Rev. Jędrzej Kitowicz wrote about while describing Polish alimentary habits during the reign of King Augustus III (r. 1734--1763).
In the early part of Augustus III's reign, there weren't that many sumptuous dishes. There was rosół [meat broth], borscht [sour soup], boiled meat, and bigos with cabbage, made of assorted chunks of meat, sausages and fatback, chopped up finely and mixed with sauerkraut, and called bigos hultajski...
|
thumb|Hunter's bigos as painted by Alfred Wierusz Kowalski (1877) It was called bigos hultajski (pronounced: BEE-gawss hool-TIE-skee), or "poor man's bigos". Back then, the Polish word hultaj (HOOL-tie) referred to an itinerant peasant who travelled from village to village or from town to town looking for various short-term jobs.[6] Bigos hultajski was, then, something like real bigos, as it was made from chopped meat, but of the cheaper kinds, like sausages and fatback, and it took its sour tang not from expensive limes or lemons, nor even from vinegar, but from sauerkraut or pickled beetroot juice. The sauerkraut had the additional advantage of serving as both filler and preservative. It wouldn't take long to discover that such sauerkraut bigos could be stored for a long time and reheated multiple times, which made it a perfect food not only for itinerant peasants and domestic servants, but also for soldiers, hunters and travellers. Zygmunt Gloger, who liked to share his personal experiences in his turn-of-the-20th-century Old Polish Encyclopedia, reminisced that "in the old way of travelling, it was a superbly practical invention of Polish cuisine, which I experienced myself in 1882, when Henryk Sienkiewicz and I travelled for a few days on horseback to the Białowieża Forest."[7]
Bigos hultajski made a stellar career not only in the culinary realm, but in literature as well -- as an ideal metaphor for any kind of messy mixture of scraps which somehow manages to remain appetizing. For instance, a two-act moralizing romantic comedy written by Jan Drozdowski in 1801, bears the title, Bigos hultajski, or The School for Triflers (Bigos hultajski, czyli szkoła trzpiotów).
As in food, so in life, there must come the hour |
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 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.[8] This was the author wrote of his own novel in the foreword to the first volume:
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 were nugded by my imagination; this why I've entitled it Bigos Hultajski, wich is made from a variety of things. It's a poor man's dish, but savoury; and perhaps it will be said of this novel that it is a poor man's roman and unsavoury.
|
With time, the word hultaj gained a negative connotation that it has today. In modern Polish, it's roughly equivalent to the English "rascal". The origin of the term bigos hultajski, now understood as "rascal's bigos", was largely forgotten. Gloger hypothesized that "because the best bigos contains the greatest amount of chopped meat, then there is a certain analogy with rascals, or brigands and highwaymen, who used to hack their victims to pieces with their sabres."[9] And so even today we can find explanations, as in Polish Wikipedia, that bigos hultajski is a kind of bigos that is particularly heavy on meat and not -- as in its original sense -- a dish in which the scarcity of meat was masked with sauerkraut.
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 most loyal fans -- Bolesław Prus (today remembered as a great novelist and somewhat less remembered as a columinst).
Even if our planet is graced by many sentient beings who are not unfamiliar with the pleasures of bigos, there are still (alas!) few mortals who have fathomed the art of preparing this stew. How, then, is it done? Thusly. On the first day, cook sauerkraut and meat separately. On the second day, combine the cooked sauerkraut with chopped meat; this is but a scaffold for a future bigos, which dilettantes consider to be true bigos already. On the third day, reheat the mixture, miscalled bigos, and douse it with grape juice. On the fourth day, reheat the substance and add some bouillon and a tiny bottle of steak sauce. On the fifth day, reheat the mixture and sprinkle it with pepper in a grenadier manner. By this point, we've got some juvenile, fledgling bigos. So, to make it mature and strong, on the sixth day, reheat it; on the seventh day, reheat it -- and --- on the eighth day, reheat it. But on the ninth day, you've got to eat it, because, on the tenth day, classical gods, attracted by the scent of bigos, may descend from the Olympus to snatch this delicacy away from the mouths of mortals! |
— </ref> |
A the end, this whole elaborate and gripping recipe turns out to be just a lengthy introduction to a piece on a totally mundane and non-culinary topic.
To reheat, toast and reheat again is a method which adds splendid characteristics to things of this world. One such thing that may be reheated forever is the question of Warsaw's sewer system. |
— ibid. |
Hard-to-Digest Bigos
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 diarrhea.
Before they got to Żółtańce, Dub stopped the car twice and after the last stop he said doggedly to Biegler: "For lunch I had bigos cooked the Polish way. From the battalion I shall make a complaint by telegram to the brigade. The sauerkraut was bad and the pork was not fit for eating. The insolence of these cooks exceeds all bounds. Whoever doesn't yet know me, will soon get to know me."
|
The good thing is that, as the Poles discovered long ago, Polish vodka not only pairs ideally with the stew, but is also an indispensable antidote to bigos-induced indigestion.
thumb|Porcelanowa bigośnica wykonana w Baranówce w ok. 1830 r.
Jeden ze szlachty miał jaszczyk bigosu. |
And because, as mentioned above, bigos was often taken as provisions for a journey, it was just as important to take an adequate amount of vodka along as well. After all, health should always come first!
In the meantime, Gaudentius, who hadn't failed to provision himself for the journey with leftovers from the feast of Yasnohorod, was busy reheating and consuming bigos, generously seasoned with sausages and fatback, which he had retrieved from his coffer, and washing it down, in strictly calculated intervals, with ample doses of vodka, which he kept by his right-hand side in a large rectangular decanter. [...] Bigos, as is known, induces great thirst, which had to be quenched with a concoction of some kind; nearby, at Finke's, this and other "remedies" were at hand for savouring. This venture, undertaken with certain tact, yet amateurishly, took quite some time; it had been over an hour since the sun had hidden below the horizon, when Mr. Pius was still exorcising the effects of the greasy bigos with last drops from the last bottle.
|
So to sum up: there's a dish that is tasty, yet hard to digest and made from ingredients of questionable quality. Let's add significant potential for figurative use and an the undeniable status as a national dish. What do we get? That's right -- bigos as a metaphor for Polish history, society, politics, and Polishness in general!
History is bigos, a indigestible hodgepodge of scraps, not just from the whole week, but from thousands of years.
|
National Bigos
Cyprian Kamil Norwid, a great poet of the second half of the 19th century, was able, in just one short poem, to mock both the national stew and the parochial mindset of Polish gentry, whose minds -- like bigos -- were just messy mixtures of diced-up thoughts.
thumb|Porcelanowa bigośnica wykonana w Baranówce w 1828 r.
What you write of bigos, the national stew, |
Ale już pan Ernest Bryll na to samo pytanie -- co o bigosie pisać narodowym -- odpowiedział sto lat później wprost, że to "potrawa groźna, ciężka [...] zmieszanie wszystkiego i też bigosowanie na sejmikach".[10] Ciemna strona bigosu, ciemna strona polskich dziejów.
What to write of bigos, the national stew? |
Mniej poetycko, ale nie mniej barwnie w bigosową przenośnię poszedł w swojej krytyce polskiej demokracji premier i minister spraw wojskowych, marsz. Piłsudski. I znowu mamy tu do czynienia z cuchnącym, niezdrowym bigosem ugotowanym z nieświeżych składników...
Jak pan widzi, panie pośle, układ konstytucji jest tak chwiejny i nieokreślony, napisana jest tak niechlujnie, jak niechlujnym jest umysł panów posłów. W ogóle powiedzieć panu muszę, że ta niechlujna pisanina czyni z naszej konstytucji coś w rodzaju kiepskiego bigosu, w który obok zgniłej szynki pakują nadgniłą słoninkę i kładą to obok nie dokiszonej kapusty; tak, że można i należy każdy paragraf i artykuł brać zupełnie osobno, nie wiążąc go [...] z żadnym innym artykułem. Naturalnie, zgniła szynka jest dla Pana Prezydenta, nadgniła słonina dla [...] rządu, no a posłom zostaje nie dokiszona kapusta. Jak pan rozumie, żołądki wtedy nie mogą nic zrobić i wychodzi z tego smród, tak, że ulica Wiejska cała śmierdzi — proszę pana. I wyjście z tego chaosu jest możliwe tylko przez zmianę Konstytucji i napisanie jej w przyzwoity sposób. Dodam do tego, że nikt nie ma prawa interpretować konstytucji. Interpretacja jest zakazana — i wobec tego państwu pozostaje tylko bigos.
|
Bigos, na dobre i złe, zdaje się tak ściśle pasować do polskiej duszy i historii, że można wyraźnie wyczuć żal Makuszyńskiego, gdy ten dochodzi do wniosku, że inna potrawa będzie jednak lepszą metaforą zjawiska, które w polskim społeczeństwie zaobserwował.
Dotąd mi się niesłusznie zdawało, że narodową potrawą polską jest bigos, wytworna potrawa z kapuścianych głów, gorzkich serc i jadowitej wątroby, potrawa pełna kwasów i przejmujących zapachów. Przecież ktoś komuś zawsze „narobił bigosu”, potem sobie dali po pysku albo w gazecie, albo w kawiarni i życie, pełne rumieńców, temperamentu i bujności, było piękne. Widzę jednak ze smutkiem, że tradycja wietrzeje i wietrzeje bigos, szlachecka potrawa, a na polskim jadłospisie pyszni się – ozór po polsku. Bigos był potrawą zamaszystą, wonią już zdaleka się oznajmiającą, pełną soków i wigoru; ozór po polsku jest już bardziej wymyślną, zaprawioną na słodko, z migdałami i rodzynkami; jest to wprawdzie najgłupsza część bezmyślnego bydlęcia, lecz słodycz przyprawy jest nad wyraz smakowita.
|
Bigos z trzykrotnym wiwatem
A teraz pora na ciekawostkę. Słyszeliście o czymś takim jak bigos z wiwatem?
thumb|Fajansowa bigośnica wykonana w Ćmielowie w latach 1860--1880
Na polowaniach podawano bigos myśliwski, a także bigos z wiwatem (ugotowany wcześniej podgrzewano w naczyniu z pokrywą oblepioną ciastem; "wystrzelenie" pokrywki pod wpływem ciśnienia oznaczało, że trzeba już jeść).
|
Mieli dawniej ludzie fantazję, co? Ale jeszcze większą ciekawostką jest to, że chociaż w Internecie można znaleźć całkiem sporo opisów tego zwyczaju (wyżej cytowany artykuł, to jeden z wielu przykładów), to, po pierwsze, wszystkie brzmią bardzo podobnie, ograniczając się do jednego czy dwóch zdań, a po drugie, żaden nie przytacza źródła tej informacji. Przecież musi być jakaś stara książka, w której ten intrygujący staropolski zwyczaj po raz pierwszy opisano?
A jednak nie udało mi się znaleźć żadnej wzmianki o "bigosie z wiwatem" w źródłach przedinternetowych. Oczywiście, jeśli samemu się nie znalazło, to można spróbować dotrzeć do niektórych z tych osób, które o tej tradycji pisały bądź mówiły. I tak zrobiłem, ale bez powodzenia. Okazało się, że albo źródło uleciało z pamięci, albo jest to po prostu fakt z gatunku tak oczywistych, że podawanie źródła nie jest konieczne. A poza tym informacji o bigosie z wiwatem jest przecież wszędzie pełno; wystarczy sięgnąć po pierwszą lepszą książkę kucharską z XIX w. Faktycznie w dawnych recepturach przewija się metoda gotowania polegająca na zalepianiu pokrywki garnka ciastem. Ćwierczakiewiczowa poleca w ten sposób przyrządzać klops angielski,[11] a Maria Gruszecka -- "esencję mięsną" dla chorych.[12] Lecz akurat przepisu na bigos z użyciem tej metody nie znalazłem. Ani tym bardziej -- przepisu, gdzie odpadnięcie pokrywki pod wpływem ciśnienia byłoby pożądanym efektem, a nie wypadkiem przy pracy. Samej frazy "bigos z wiwatem" też nie udało mi się wyszukać.
Odkryłem za to, że nie tylko nie pojawia się ona w dostępnych mi źródłach przedinternetowych, ale nie ma jej też w źródłach internetowych starszych niż 26 listopada 2006 r. Co takiego wydarzyło się owego dnia? Otóż wtedy Tomasz Steifer, malarz i heraldyk, dodał w artykule hasłowym "Bigos" w polskiej Wikipedii m.in. następującą informację:
W kuchni staropolskiej, zwłasza na polowaniach, znany był bigos z wiwatem, polegający na ogrzewaniu przygotowanej wcześniej potrawy w garnku z pokrywką szczelnie przylepioną ciastem. Głośne "wystrzelenie" pokrywki, pod wpływem ciśnienia, oznaczało gotowość potrawy do spożycia.
|
Tu również nie podano źródła i ta sytuacja nie zmieniła się do dzisiaj. A jako że sam od wielu lat jestem wikipedystą, to powiem Wam, że każda informacja w Wikipedii jest warta tyle, na ile wiarygodne jest źródło podane w przypisie. A jeśli przypisu nie ma? No właśnie. A jednak Wikipedia cieszy na tyle dobrą reputacją, że owa ciekawostka błyskawicznie rozprzestrzeniła się po Internecie. Czy pan Steifer wyczytał tę ciekawostkę w jakiejś książce, do której nie udało mi się dotrzeć, czy też opisał zasłyszaną gdzieś anegdotkę, rodzinną tradycję, a może pisał wyłącznie z głowy własnej? Tego możemy się już nigdy nie dowiedzieć, bo w 2015 r. Tomasz Steifer zmarł.
Możliwe, rzecz jasna, że to źródło gdzieś jednak istnieje, a ten dziwaczny zwyczaj faktycznie istniał. Jeśli ktoś z Was przypomina sobie, że kiedyś o tym czytał, najlepiej z papierowego nośnika, to będę wdzięczny za namiary bibliograficzne. A może ktoś sam przyrządza tę potrawę w taki sposób i chciałby się podzielić osobistym doświadczeniem z wiwatującym bigosem?
Tymczasem powróćmy jeszcze na koniec do Pana Tadeusza, bo z argumentem, że przecież "bigos z wiwatem" pojawia się w poemacie Mickiewicza, również się spotkałem. Rzeczywiście, słowa "bigos" i "wiwat" znajdują się nawet w tym samym wersie. Ale kto tu wiwatuje -- i to trzykrotnie? Czy garnek z bigosem (pod wpływem ciśnienia), czy może atakujący ten garnek myśliwi (z radości, że bigos już się odgrzał)? Przeczytajcie i oceńcie sami.
Bigos już gotów. Strzelcy z trzykrotnym wiwatem, |
— Mickiewicz, op. cit., księga IV, wersy 846–850 |
Przepis
Przepis -- tradycyjnie -- musi być. A ponieważ cały dzisiejszy wpis mógłby też nosić tytuł "Bigos w literaturze", to poniżej zamieszczam najdokładniejszą recepturę przyrządzenia bigosu, jaką znalazłem w formie wiersza.
Trzeba garnek wziąć. |
— Kern, Ludwik Jerzy (1996), Bigos, Przekrój nr 2686 (50/1996), s. 42 |
Przypisy
◀️ Previous | 📜 List of posts | Next ▶️ |
⏮️ First | 🎲 Random post | Latest ⏭️ |