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Text replacement - "recipe" to "recipë"
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You may remember from [[Genuine Old Polish Bigos|my previous post]] that sauerkraut was merely optional, and usually absent, in Old Polish bigos. In Mickiewicz's version, though, it was already an indispensable ingredient of the reciperecipë.
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With time, the word ''"hultaj"'' gained a negative connotation that it has today. In modern Polish, it's roughly equivalent to the English "rascal". The origin of the term ''"bigos hultajski"'', now understood as "rascal's bigos", was largely forgotten. Gloger hypothesised that "because the best bigos contains the greatest amount of chopped meat, then there is a certain analogy with rascals, or brigands and highwaymen, who used to hack their victims to pieces with their sabres."<ref>Gloger, ''op. cit.''</ref> And so even today we can find explanations, as in [https://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bigos&oldid=54979769 Polish Wikipedia,] that ''bigos hultajski'' is a kind of bigos that is particularly heavy on meat and not – as in its original sense – a dish in which the scarcity of meat was masked with sauerkraut.
By the time Mickiewicz wrote ''Pan Tadeusz'', which was in the early 1830s, ''bigos hultajski'' must have become so popular that it supplanted all other, older, kinds of bigos. Then it could finally drop the disparaging epithet and become, simply, bigos. No self-respecting Polish cookbook writer of the 19th century could neglect to include a few recipes recipës for sauerkraut bigos in her works – including the great (both figuratively and literally) Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa. Below, I quote a recipe recipë written by one of her most loyal fans – Bolesław Prus (today remembered as a great novelist and somewhat less remembered as a columnist).
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In the end, this whole elaborate and gripping recipe recipë turns out to be just a lengthy introduction to a piece on a totally mundane and non-culinary topic.
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That would be some loud cheer! But an even greater curiosity is that, while you can find quite a few descriptions of this tradition on the Internet (mostly in Polish, though), they all sound quite similar (usually not longer than one or two sentences) and, what's more, none of them cites any sources of this information. Surely, if it's really a time-honoured tradition it is claimed to be, then it must have been mentioned in some old books, right?
However, I've been unable to find any mention of the "bigos with a cheer" in pre-Internet sources. You could say, of course, that I could have asked some of those people who wrote or talked about it. Well, I tried, but to no avail. It would turn out that either the source has escaped that person's memory or that it's simply a fact so obvious that no citations are necessary. Besides, you can find information about bigos with a cheer everywhere, I've been told; just grab any 19th-century cookbook that comes to hand. Well, it is true that old recipes recipës do mention a method of cooking where the pot is sealed with dough. Ćwierczakiewiczowa advises to cook the "English meatloaf" in such a way,<ref>{{Cyt
| nazwisko = Ćwierczakiewiczowa
| imię = Lucyna
| strony = 30
| url = https://polona.pl/item/ilustrowany-kucharz-krakowski-dla-oszczednych-gospodyn-smaczne-i-tanie-obiady-dla-domow,OTU1OTQzNTY/57
}}</ref> But still no sight of bigos cooked in a sealed pot, let alone a recipe recipë where a lid blowing off the pot would be a desired effect rather than accident. Nor was I able to find the phrase ''"bigos z wiwatem"'' anywhere I looked.
What I did discover was that this peculiar kind of bigos not only doesn't seem to be mentioned in pre-Internet sources, but it's also absent in online sources that are older than 26 November 2006. So what happened on the particular day? This is when Tomasz Steifer, a painter and heraldist, [https://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bigos&diff=5477053&oldid=5246284 added the following information to the "Bigos" article] in Polish Wikipedia:
It's possible, of course, that the source does exist and that this quaint method of cooking bigos was actually practised. So if you remember having read about it somewhere, then I will be very grateful for a bibliographic reference. Or maybe you prepare bigos in this way yourself and would like to share your personal experience with cheering bigos in the comment section below?
The only recipe recipë I'm aware of that could be described as "bigos with a cheer" (although this appellation is not used in the source) is a hint, given by Castellan Adam Grodziecki in his 17th-century manuscript, for a rather bawdy and somewhat primitive prank. It's bigos with a cheer that you can smell!
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|opis=Bigos preparation starts at 1:26. <br />[https://www.bbc.com/food/recipesrecipës/bigos_stew_69890 Click here] for their reciperecipë.
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