Bigos
meat and cabbage stew from Poland
Bigos (Polish pronunciation: [ˈbʲiɡɔs] ), or hunter's stew, is a Polish dish of chopped meat of various kinds stewed with sauerkraut, shredded fresh cabbage and spices. It is served hot and can be enriched with additional vegetables and wine. Originally from Poland, the dish also became traditional in the areas of the vast Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Etymology
The Polish word bigos is probably of Italian or German origin, but its exact etymology is disputed. According to the Polish loanword dictionary edited by Elżbieta Sobol, it may derive from German begossen, meaning "doused" or "basted". Jerzy Bralczyk similarly derives the word from archaic German Beiguss, "sauce". Aleksander Brückner has proposed the German Bleiguss, "piece of lead", as a possible source, referring to a tradition of divining from strangely shaped flakes of molten lead dropped into water. Maria Dembińska rejects this etymology as "doubtlessly erroneous", suggesting instead either archaic German becken, "to chop", or old German bîbôz (Beifuss in modern German), meaning "mugwort" (Artemisia vulgaris), a herb that was popular in medieval cuisine. Andrzej Bańkowski also points to the Italian bigutta, or "pot for cooking soup", as a possible derivation via German.
Ingredients and preparation
The principal ingredients of bigos are assorted kinds of meat chopped into bite-sized chunks and a mixture of sauerkraut and shredded fresh white cabbage.
“Bigos” enters the record as meat and cabbage stew from Poland. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bigos, meat and cabbage can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bigos” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.