[Sca-cooks] Peasant food// bigos and cabbage

[Stephanie Howe]

Ahh!  Ya beat me to it!  :)

Olga
----- Original Message -----
From: "johnna holloway" <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
To: <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 10:37 AM
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Peasant food// bigos and cabbage


> Philip & Susan Troy wrote:
> > For example, it seems like what we absolutely, honest-to-gosh,
> > take-it-to-the-bank _know_ is that, say, bigos is old, at least 200
> > years, probably more.>
> > We believe, either from archaeological finds, old written recipes from
> > other cultures like, say, the Romans, that it's a really safe bet the
> > Poles have been eating cabbage for the last 1000 years or more.>
> > At risk of dropping a logical link or two, but cutting to the chase, we
> > can therefore speculate that it's to some degree likely that the Poles
> > have been eating bigos for some mumbledy-hundred years. And it _is_
> > likely. > Adamantius
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> There is quite a bit of material on consumption of cabbage and the
> history of "bigos" within Maria Dembinska's Food and Drink in
> Medieval Poland. The book sees "bigos" as a "cabbage and meat dish
> of more recent adoption." (p.20) "still a part of the living food
> culture of the country... Mikolaj Rej did not mention bigos specifically
> in any of his writings during the sixteenth century, so the dish
> must have assumed its more familiar name and form within the past
> three hundred years." (pp 20-21). William Woys Weaver offers a version
> in the recipe section but fails to correlate the recipe with the earlier
> text. He does admit that he has taken what ingredients were available,
> combined them with medieval preparation techniques and come up with
> recipes for various dishes of a cuisine that has no surviving medieval
> cookery texts. His various discussions are exactly akin to what has
> been being discussed here regarding peasant cuisine and recreating
> versions of dishes that have no recipes. See pages 141-146 and chapter
> 4.
> Cabbage is covered on pages 123-125.
>
> Johnnae llyn Lewis  Johnna Holloway
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