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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."<ref>Gloger, ''op. cit.''</ref> And so even today we can find explanations, as in [https://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bigos&oldid=54979769 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 which was in the early 1830s, ''bigos hultajski'' must had have become so popular that it supplanted all other, older, kinds of bigos. Then it could finally drop the disparaging epithet and become, simply, bigos. No self-respecting Polish cookbook writer of the 19th century could 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 by one of her most loyal fans – Bolesław Prus (today remembered as a great novelist and somewhat less remembered as a columnist).
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