[xtypo_dropcap]A[/xtypo_dropcap]hh, food. No picture of a culture would be complete without a foray into its culinary traditions. And Christmas holidays the world over might still be as enchanting without the copious amounts of victuals that invariably line most tables, but it would not be half as sweet.
In an effort to illustrate more fully the culture of this fine land, let me invite our readers on a part-virtual part-literal journey into the belly of one of Poland’s best-known Christmas dishes. Sometimes translated as hunter’s stew, it’s called “bigos” (pronounced like a combination of bee and gas).
It’s not often that specific dishes, referred to by name, make it into the verses of epic poems that are on compulsory reading lists in schools, but bigos is just such a dish. Marcel Weyland’s translation of the 1834 epic poem Pan Tadeusz, written by Poland’s greatest poet Adam Mickiewicz, describes a hunting party enjoying a piping hot pot of bigos:
“In the pots warmed the bigos; mere words cannot tell
Of its wondrous taste, color and marvelous smell.
One can hear the words buzz, and the rhymes ebb and flow,
But its content no city digestion can know.”
But let’s retun to the future and deconstruct this historic pearl of the palate by taking a look at a basic recipe.
Step 1: Start with cabbage
Cabbage is a staple in Polish cuisine. It’s plentiful, cheap, and supposedly quite nutritious. Its three main forms (raw, boiled and pickled) abound in a variety of dishes.
Our bigos recipe calls for a couple of pounds of pickled cabbage or sauerkraut, (kapusta kiszona) to be thrown into a large pot and simmered for three or four hours.
Step 2: Add meat
Pretty much any kind will do. All cuts of pork, beef, and game are allowed, and a pot of bigos will gratefully swallow up any meat leftovers too. Just dice it up and toss it in. So practical.
Step 3: Add other tidbits and season to taste
Being a traditional, folk dish, the recipe for bigos is not standardized, but since wild mushroom picking is pretty much a Polish national pastime, some wild mushrooms are de rigueur. Prunes, honey, or tomatoes to give it a hint of sweet, and the rest is pretty much whatever goes: salt, pepper, juniper berries, marjoram, bay leaf, and caraway are the usual suspects.
Step 4: The perpetual stew approach
Bigos is sometimes referred to as a perpetual stew. It’s not unusual to keep a pot going for a week or more, simply freezing or refrigerating what’s left and reheating it the following day, sometimes replenishing some ingredients or throwing in some tasty leftovers. They say that doing this enhances the taste, which peaks around day three. No risk, no fun, I suppose.
On nearly every Christmas since I moved here, I’ve visited my relatives in a remote corner of northeastern Poland. It’s a long drive and one year I decided to sample some bigos at a roadside bar. It turned out to be one of the most agonizing holiday experiences ever.
For two days after I didn’t get out much. Off the toilet, that is. Turns out bigos is a dish best served by trusted hands and not something you should risk ordering at a roadside bar because you just never know how literally some people take the idea of perpetual.
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