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| strony = 30
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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; there were already known to ancient Romans. We can find some recipes for minutal in ''De Re Coquinaria'' (''On the Subject of Cooking''), a cookbook that has been traditionally credtied 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 for ''minutal ex praecoquis'', or chopped pork with apricots.
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[[File:Minutal.jpg|thumb|200px|A modern reconstruction of pork-and-apricot minutal]]
| tytuł = De re coquinaria
| url = http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost04/Apicius/api_re04.html
}}, own traslationtranslation
| oryg = Adicies in caccabum oleum liquamen vinum concides cepam ascaloniam aridam spatulam porcinam coctam tessellatim concides his omnibus coctis teres piper cuminum mentam siccam anethum suffundis mel liquamen passum acetum modice ius de suo sibi temperabis praecoqua enucleata mittis facies ut ferveant donec percoquantur tractam confringes ex ea obligas piper aspargis et inferes
}}
[[File:Bigos naleśnikowy.jpg|thumb|200px|Modern crêpe bigos]]
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 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 for carp, pike, crayfish, oyster or even crêpe bigos (or ''bigosek'', a dimnutive diminutive form often used back then).
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In vinegar's stead. Then I gave it a look;
The dog wouldn't eat it! So I called for the cook:
Bigos in mournig mourning is a novelty, but
Don't you dare make an inkwell out of my butt!</poem>
| źródło = {{Cyt
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 ''<small>AH</small>-shee'' 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 for a purely vegetarian dish made from diced root vegatablesvegetables. Wielądko calls it "carrot-and-parsnip bigos".
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