Bigos (Sauerkraut and Meat Stew)

Variations

• Hunter's stew. It was originally made with game, and plenty of households still put in venison, wild boar or wild duck. That is where the English name comes from.
• Sauerkraut only. Leave the fresh cabbage out and it is far sourer and much darker. Half and half is the commonest version and is what the recipe above makes.
• Instead of prunes. A grated apple, or a spoonful of plum jam. The sweetness does the same job.
• Red wine or madeira. A cup is common. That it does not all cook off is in Cooking with Alcohol.
• The neighbours. Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine eat it too, as ko.wikipedia notes — but it is Poland's that is treated as a national dish.
• How it is served. With dark rye bread, or alongside Pierogi.

Tips

• The acid is what holds the cabbage together. Soaking says "vinegar, tomato and lemon set pectin firm", which is why tomato goes into a bean dish only after the beans are tender. There it is an obstruction. In bigos it is the thing that makes the dish work: fresh cabbage would be mush after three hours, but sauerkraut has already stiffened the pectin in its own cell walls with the lactic acid it made, so the strands survive.
• That is why the fresh cabbage goes in first. Reverse the order and the whole pot turns acidic before the fresh cabbage has softened, so it stays crunch-firm to the end and the two textures never meet. Exactly the reasoning behind the order in a bean dish.
• Read it beside Sauerbraten. That page says the claim that vinegar tenderises meat is wrong, because acid stops a few millimetres in. It cannot get inside meat, but it does hold a vegetable's structure. Same acid, opposite result, decided by what it is acting on.
• The long cook is partly about losing the sourness. Fermentation says boiling a fermented paste hard kills its aroma and its cultures, so it goes in at the end. Bigos deliberately does the reverse: hours of simmering drives off the raw sharp smell of the kraut, and what is left is the non-volatile lactic acid and something much deeper under it. Which is why the kraut juice goes back in at the end to restore the sourness.
• Do not throw the kraut juice away. It is the acidity control for the whole dish. Squeeze it out and keep it and you can raise the sourness at the end without adding water.
• There should be no broth left. Skip the last uncovered half hour and you have cabbage soup. Mounding on a spoon is the test.
• The next day is a different dish. Chilled and reheated, the smoke moves into the cabbage and the acid into the meat. Unlike Carbonnade Flamande, which builds its sweet-sour from beer and sugar during cooking, this one finishes its balance outside the pot, in time.