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Apart from ''bigos'', there's also the quaint Polish verb ''bigosować'', which means "to chop" or "to hack". And it wasn't only used in culinary contexts; it also referred to one of the favourite methods of torture and execution used by the Polish noblemengentry; to "bigos someone up" was to hack him to pieces with sabres. "Bigos them up!" is a call we can find in the 17th-century diaries of Jan Chryzostom Pasek and in the historical novels by Henryk Sienkiewicz that Pasek inspired. The valiant Polish nobility apparently kept abreast of times and even learned to bigos with the use of firearms, as we can see in another of Wacław Potocki's poems, where he mentions "hot bigos of lead and gunpowder".