National dishes are like folk songs, passed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next. Their recipes are born out of a need, a time and a landscape: when only certain ingredients are available, you make do.
So what can you learn about a culture (even about yourself) through a recipe?
Quite a lot it turns out.
During WWII my family fled Poland, smuggling themselves across borders and onto ships through Southern Europe, across Northern Africa and eventually onwards to the UK. A few years ago, we travelled with my grandmother back to the crumbling home and razed fields which she had abandoned at the age of nine. During this trip, I found myself in a wooden hut by the foot of the Tatra mountains, a steaming bowl of stew in front of me. The smoky yet slightly sour smell was tenderly familiar.
This was bigos, Poland’s national dish.
For me, bigos holds memories of huge cauldrons rolled out at 3am between toasts during family weddings, of Easters spent tiptoeing to reach and stir a bubbling liquid on my grandmother’s hob.
The dish varies by region, by family, and by time – evolving from the hearty snack of hunters camped out in soaring pine forests, to thin cupfuls wolfed down by families sheltering decades later among those same trees from the gunfire of invading armies. These recipes tell better than any history book the story of a nation that was wiped from the maps of Europe for 123 years.
Making bigos takes time, but it also gives you back time (and places and people you thought you’d lost). So, one afternoon, my mother and I decide to dust off the decaying spine of an old recipe book and do just that.
First we chop some pickled cabbage. Bigos is very much a product of the Polish landscape. It’s full of preserved vegetables to last families through long winter months of frostbitten ground. As my mother unscrews the jar, wafts of fermented cabbage erupt out, bringing with them floods of memories. We remember stories old friends and relatives used to tell about harvest-time: of women collecting overflowing baskets of cabbages from the fields by day, and then, after sundown, the men arriving home to sing songs, drink vodka and grate the cabbages.
One of these friends, the 96 year old Pani Turska, reminiscing about growing up on a farm in the Polish mountains, recalls: “We’d put the grated cabbage into a huge barrel which reached my shoulder. The men would climb in and stamp on it to flatten the leaves. Then we’d leave it to ferment till Easter.”
Next, we chop fresh cabbage and boil the two in separate pots, preserving the sour water from the sauerkraut as we drain it. The dish’s pickled flavours mature with age which means bigos tastes better each time you reheat it. Noblemen and women would hurtle through the snow from one manor house to the next on kuligs (traditional Polish sleigh-ride parties) for endless rounds of drinking and dancing. A cauldron of bigos would sit in the back of the sleigh to be reheated with each new party.
We begin to chop the onions and the meat. Traditionally hunters would throw in various smoked meats along with anything fresh they’d caught that day: wild pork, game, venison…the more different types of meat, the more deliciously complex the flavours become. Even the name bigos roughly translates as “big mess”. Sadly our local supermarket doesn’t boast of its own “wild boar” aisle, so instead we slice up smoked Polish sausage and stewing pork, watching it hiss and spit golden bubbles as it is added to melted butter in the pot.
When wartime came the kuligs and merrymaking disappeared – as did the meat. Stirring, steaming and slicing with my grandmother, she would tell me stories about the night they heard that the German army was approaching. The family crossed deserts, joined rebel armies, bartered their possessions and eventually found themselves in a refugee camp in Algeria.
The taste of bigos during these years was no longer sour, but a sweet comfort that you would survive a little longer. To feed the family, she and her mother would have to make do with the rations they were given or scavenge for ingredients. They used whatever was available – replacing cabbage with aubergines, meat with water. The camp had no bathrooms and just one communal kitchen. Women would take it in turns to cook, dodging and ducking around families washing in the kitchen sink.
As my mother and I dice a handful of wild mushrooms, the earthy smell releases a fresh wave of recollections. We combine the mushrooms with the two cabbages, the sour water, some tomato paste, red wine, beef stock, thyme, marjoram, juniper berries and a pinch of allspice. Memories of happier times ooze out along with the red colour of the wine as it stains the cabbage a rosy pink – my grandmother’s memories of picking mushrooms in the woods before war began, and our own of being taken to woodlands outside of London to hunt for treasure among the ferns.
We throw in a handful of prunes and mix the concoction together in the pot, cooking until the liquid reduces down to a thick stew. In former times, the pre-prepared bigos was heated over a campfire, tightly sealed with a lid. When enough heat pressure had built up, the lid would burst off with a loud pop which the hunters called a “cheer”. Mindful of the dangers of exploding pots, we give our 21st century bigos a little ventilation. A day of simmering, cooling and reheating and the bigos is ready to serve with a large chunk of rye bread and a larger glass of vodka. In the words of Poland’s most famous poet, Adam Mickiewicz, in his epic poem Pan Tadeusz: “The bigos is being cooked. No word can tell the wonder of its colour, taste and smell”.
When you sink your teeth into a piece of smoked meat that seems to melt away on contact, no words are needed. From the measly scraps shared by families during the Polish Occupation to the bowls slurped and savored on Christmases and Easters by second and third generation immigrants like myself…even a mouthful of bigos is enough to give a taste of the identity and history of Poland.
