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| Bigos is one of those Polish dishes that has been romanticized in poetry, discussed in its most minute details in all sorts of literary contexts, and never made in small quantities. Historically, it was served at royal banquets or to guests at meals following a hunt. It was made invariably from several types of game and served during winter. Bigos has gradually assumed the character of a Christmas and Easter dish in Poland, and today recipes recipës are as varied and as complex as any Italian recipe recipë for tomato sauce. In fact, some Poles even add tomato sauce to the mixture. (It does not need it.)

Now, the problem is that ever since the word ''bigos'' has been used in the Polish language, it had more to do with the action of chopping than with pouring. The earliest known mention is a ''bigos'' recipe recipë found in a herbal by Stefan Falimirz published in Cracow in 1534, entitled ''Of Herbs and their Potency''. It was a work on medicine rather than a cookbook, so this oldest known ''bigos'' wasn't so much a dish as a medicine against "Saint Valentine's illness", or epilepsy.

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; these were already known to ancient Romans. We can find some recipes recipës for minutal in ''De Re Coquinaria'' (''On the Subject of Cooking''), a cookbook that has been traditionally credited 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 recipë for ''minutal ex praecoquis'', or chopped pork with apricots.

I've found an interesting attempt at reconstruction of this dish. The author of the ''[http://pass-the-garum.blogspot.com/2012/10/pork-and-fruit-minutal.html Pass the Garum]'' blog, devoted to cooking according to ancient Roman recipesrecipës, hints that you can replace liquamen, or Roman fish sauce, with store-bought Thai ''nam pla'' mixed with reduced white-grape juice; and instead of tracta, or Roman flatbread, you can use cornstarch as an equally good thickener.

And here's a Polish recipe recipë for "Jesuit ''bigos''" from a manuscript cookbook written at the court of princes Radziwiłł at the end of the 17th century:

Nice! As you can see, this recipe recipë is quite similar to the Roman one, even though it calls for beef, which Polish magnates valued more than pork. Again, we've got here a fusion of sour (wine, vinegar, lime, lemon), sweet (sugar, raisins, malmsey), spicy (pepper, cloves, more pepper) and fatty (butter, olives, more butter) flavours. This combination of tastes had not changed since ancient times and can be seen in all Polish recipes recipës for ''bigos'' (and other dishes) from that time.

What's more, not only did Old Polish ''bigos'' contain not even a soupçon of cabbage, but even meat was only optional. As long as ''"bigos"'' meant "something chopped up", you could make it out of anything that could be chopped. So apart from veal, capon (castrated cock), wether mutton (castrated ram), rabbit, hazel grouse or beef marrow ''bigos'', we also know recipes recipës for carp, pike, crayfish, oyster or even ''crêpe bigos'' (or ''bigosek'', a diminutive form often used back then).

The 18th century introduced a kind of ''bigos'' that was a little more like the one we know today. It was made from a variety of meats, with exotic spices replaced by domestic herbs and veggies, but still no cabbage. We can find the following recipe recipë in ''Kucharz doskonały'' (''The Perfect Cook'') by Wojciech Wielądko, the second-oldest fully-preserved cookbook printed in Polish:

But if you think that we're finally going to prove the Polish origin of one of Poland's most famous dishes, then think again. Wielądko didn't write about Polish cuisine; his book was a translation of ''La cuisinière bourgeoise'' by Menon. He modified the book's title to better suit his Polish readers' expectations (the cook in the original title is an urban woman, but the one in Wielądko's translation is a man of unspecified origin), but the recipes recipës themselves remained French, even if much abridged. So does it mean that ''bigos'' is originally a French dish then? Yes and no. Wielądko simply used the word ''"bigos"'' as the Polish equivalent to what Menon referred to as ''"hachis"'' (pronounced ''ahˑ<u>shee</u>'' and derived from the verb ''"hacher"'', "to chop", which is related to the English "hatchet"). We could probably trace the origins of that dish also back to the ancient Roman ''minutal. Minutal, hachis, salmigondis, hutsepot, hodgepodge, bigos''... they all belong to one big family of chopped dishes, once featured on tables throughout Europe. Which is not surprising, if you think about it: chopping, dicing or mincing was the only way of processing meat before the first half of the 19th century, when the German inventor Karl Drais built the first meat grinder. It was only then that pâtés, sausages and fillings in the form of a uniform mass became possible.

Besides, as I've mentioned already, it wasn't only meat that was being chopped. Both in Menon's book and in Wielądko's translation we can find a recipe recipë for a purely vegetarian dish made from diced root vegetables. Wielądko calls it "carrot-and-parsnip ''bigos''".

And now it's time for my own interpretation of a 17th-century recipe recipë for a genuine Old Polish ''bigos'' – without meat and without cabbage! I've started by cutting a cod fillet into bite-sized morsels and marinated them in a mixture of olive oil, apple vinegar, lime juice, honey, cinnamon and nutmeg. The least Old Polish element in this mix was honey, which I used instead of sugar, the favourite sweetener of the Polish nobles of yore. On the next day, I removed the fish from the marinade and baked it in an oven.

In a wok, I browned some chopped onion in butter and then added some (wait for it!) gooseberries (at this time of the year only frozen ones were availabe, but it doesn't matter in this case) as well as some port-soaked raisins and dried cranberries. Once the gooseberries were reduced to a pulp, I added the fish, some olives and heated the wok a little more. As for olives, they do crop up in Old Polish ''bigos'' recipesrecipës, but I think this dish would have been just as good without them.

The sides were purely my own idea, not based on any old recipesrecipës: sautéed buckwheat-flour drop noodles and caramelized kohlrabi on puréed parsley root. I told my guests that what they were having was a kind of ''bigos''; they did notice the fish flavour, but were certain that they could also taste some sauerkraut.