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The Christmas-carnival period is a time when Poles eat particularly large amounts of ''bigos'' – assorted meats that are chopped up and stewed for hours with sauerkraut and shredded cabbage. It's a dish that you can prepare in ample quantity in advance, then freeze it (formerly, by simply storing it outside; today, in a freezer) and then reheat it multiple times, which – it is known – only improves the flavour. ''Bigos'' (pronounced ''<small>BEE</small>-: {{pron|bee|gawss''}}) is commonly regarded as one of the top dishes in the Polish culinary canon; one would be hard pressed to name a more typically Polish food. This is how American food historian William Woys Weaver described it:

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 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 ''ah-{{small|SHE}}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.