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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's wasn't referred to as ''bigos''! On the other hand, we've got something that was, indeed, called ''bigos'' -- chopped veal that was probably seasoned sour, spicy and sweet, in line with the culinary trends of the time. This one is 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 servant's table, then? Perhaps as leavings from their lord's table. In this case, the hungry and humiliated protagonist would have been reduced to eating leftovers of leftovers! In the meal made of these scraps, was the sauerkraut still a separate dish that was served as a side to the veal bigos, or was everything mixed 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?