[[File:Cnapius bigos.jpg|300px|From: Cnapius, Gregorius (1643, 2nd ed.) ''[http://ebuw.uw.edu.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?id=283674 Thesaurus polonolatinogræcus,]'' Kraków, p. 30]]
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 in ''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 centuries CE. What follows is a recipe for ''minutal ex praecoquis'', or chopped pork with apricots.
[[File:Minutal.jpg|thumb|200px|A modern reconstruction of pork-and-apricot minutal]]