The meats may include pork (such as ham, shoulder, bacon, ribs, and loin), beef and veal, poultry (chicken, duck, goose, turkey) and game, as well as charcuterie, especially various kinds of kiełbasa.

[20][21][22] Other ingredients often added to bigos include onions, diced and browned in lard together with the meat, and dried forest mushrooms[23] that are precooked separately in boiling water.

[11][25] The tart flavor of sauerkraut may be enhanced by adding some dry red wine[17][22] or beet sour (fermented beetroot juice that is also a traditional ingredient of borscht), which may impart a reddish hue to the stew.

[38] As a dish that does not spoil quickly and is thought to improve with each reheating, bigos has been traditionally used as a provision for travellers[39][40] and campers or consumed at outdoor events, such as a hunt or a carnival sleigh ride known in Polish as kulig.

[22] Varieties of flavored vodka that match well with bigos include żubrówka (bison grass), jałowcówka (juniper), piołunówka (wormwood), Goldwasser (various herbs) and starka (oak-aged).

Similar layered dishes of medieval origin also exist in other European cuisines; they include the Italian mescolanza (known in 16th-century Poland under the Polonized name miszkulancja) and the Alsatian Baeckeoffe (also known as potée boulangère), made from cabbage, leftover meats and fruits.

It is traditionally made from sliced or diced potatoes, onions, carrots, sausages and bacon arranged in layers inside a cast-iron cauldron greased with lard and lined with cabbage leaves, which is placed in bonfire embers for baking.

[48] At that time, it referred to any dish of finely chopped components, usually meat or fish – but no cabbage – doused generously with melted butter and heavily seasoned with sour, sweet and spicy ingredients.

[53] Stanisław Czerniecki, head chef to Prince Aleksander Michał Lubomirski, who consistently used the diminutive form bigosek, included several recipes for it in his Compendium ferculorum (A Collection of Dishes), the oldest surviving book imprinted and published originally in Polish, in 1682 (however, in ca.

[58] Seasonings that appear in most of these recipes include onions, wine vinegar, lemon or lime juice, verjuice, sorrel, sugar, raisins, black pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and cumin.

[61] Kucharz doskonały (The Perfect Cook), a cookbook published by Wojciech Wielądko in 1783, contains recipes for beef, veal, wether mutton, oyster, as well as root vegetable bigos (the latter was a mixture of carrots, parsnip, rutabaga and celeriac).

[64] Over the course of the 19th century, its rise in popularity continued as the proportion of meat decreased in favor of sauerkraut, eventually superseding all other kinds of bigos and losing the disparaging epithet in the process.

Without these, still a dish of no mediocre worth Is bigos, made from legumes, best grown in the earth; Pickled cabbage comes foremost, and properly chopped, Which itself, is the saying, will in one's mouth hop; In the boiler enclosed, with its moist bosom shields Choicest morsels of meat raised on greenest of fields; Then it simmers, till fire has extracted each drop Of live juice, and the liquid boils over the top, And the heady aroma wafts gently afar.

With triple hurrah Charge the huntsmen, spoon-armed, the hot vessel to raid, Brass thunders and smoke belches, like camphor to fade, Only in depths of cauldrons, there still writhes there later Steam, as if from a dormant volcano's deep crater.

Bigos is considered a Polish national dish,[23] which, according to American food historian William Woys Weaver, "has been romanticized in poetry, discussed in its most minute details in all sorts of literary contexts, and never made in small quantities.