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Jan Długosz on King Władysław Jagiełło’s master chef and the invention of bigos

Paul Milliman

The following portrait blends fact with historical fiction to playfully explore why so many sites on the Internet claim that bigos, a hunter’s stew and one of the national dishes of Poland, was invented by King Władysław Jagiełło, a Lithuanian pagan, who converted to Christianity, married Queen Jadwiga of Poland, and founded a dynasty that controlled much of eastern Europe for almost two centuries.

Bigos is composed of a variety of different game meats, so the passage in Jan Długosz’s Annales seu cronicae incliti regni Poloniae [Annals or Chronicles of the Illustrious Kingdom of Poland] in which King Władysław Jagiełło returned to Kraków from a hunting expedition with diverse kinds of game meat in time to celebrate Carnival and his second marriage in 1401 seems like the perfect place to insert this bit of received wisdom into the historical record. Jan Długosz (1415–1480) is the main narrative source for medieval Polish history. His twelve-volume work, Annales seu cronicae incliti regni Poloniae, records the history of Poland from its founding in the tenth century until his own day. King Władysław Jagiełło’s wedding to Anna, granddaughter of King Kazimierz the Great of Poland (1333–1370), is presented by Długosz as particularly important in the history of Poland, because after the death of Queen Jadwiga in 1399, Władysław Jagiełło’s claim to the throne could be challenged and the Polish-Lithuanian union was imperiled. Therefore, it was necessary to demonstrate to both domestic and foreign magnates that his reign was legitimate. What better way to do this than for the king to work with his master chef to invent a new national dish to be served at the wedding feast, where food could be used as propaganda to demonstrate the union of Poland and Lithuania under the rule of Władysław Jagiełło?

There are many ways to prepare bigos, but its essential components are various meats, particularly game meats, which are first roasted then diced and cooked low and slow together with sauerkraut and vegetables and fruits for a long time. No recipe for bigos survives from the Middle Ages. The earliest recipes called “bigosek” appear in the first Polish cookbook, Stanisław Czerniecki’s Compendium Ferculorum, which was first published in 1682. But these recipes barely resemble traditional bigos. They are essentially just diced meat dishes, composed of one or two kinds of meat, and many of the bigosek recipes are in fact for fish, so these dishes could be eaten on fast days. Medieval and early modern Europeans were concerned about mixing too many different kinds of meat in the same dish, because different meats had different natures, which could upset the humoral balance of their consumers if those natures were not corrected by means of preparation or with sauces. People were also concerned about the order in which different foods were eaten. Digestion was looked upon as the final stage in the cooking process in which the stomach cooked the foods that were consumed. Consuming foods in an improper order could be the alimentary equivalent of throwing a frozen turkey into a deep fryer. Of course, just as today, not everyone heeded the advice of healthcare professionals, so some medieval dishes did combine a variety of meats, and it was common to offer a variety of meat dishes in the same course. Moreover, a thick, spiced, sweet and sour stew of meat subjected to multiple cooking techniques is something that would have appealed to medieval tastes.

We do not know a great deal about master chefs in the Polish royal court in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. We know the names of a few, identified in documents as regis magister coquine [master of the king’s kitchen]. But, we know very little about how the royal kitchens in medieval Wawel palace operated at the turn of the fifteenth century. Fortunately, the high cuisine at the time was very international, so it is likely that the royal kitchens in Wawel operated in ways similar to kitchens in the better understood courts of Western Europe. So, my Polish master chef is a pastiche, incorporating the characteristics of master chefs in courts throughout Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I also use as a model the author of the first Polish cookbook, Stanisław Czerniecki. Although many of the courts of Western Europe had rejected medieval cuisine by the late seventeenth century in favor of something closer to classical French cuisine, Polish courts continued to prefer medieval tastes, the heavily spiced flavors of which are closer to the cuisines of modern Middle Eastern and North African countries, but which had come to be thought of by some seventeenth-century western Europeans as a uniquely “Polish” style which was not part of their collective culinary history and identity.

We do not know who the king’s master chef was in 1401. But, we do know something about Queen Jadwiga’s master chef in the 1390s, Jakusz (or Janusz) of Boturzyn. It is possible that he may have occupied this position in her husband’s court after Jadwiga’s death in 1399. In any case, my master chef is intended to be someone like Jakusz, who Maria Dembińska has suggested “was quite capable of compiling his own recipe book since he spoke several languages, including Latin.” Dembińska also has this to say about the role of the master chef in medieval courts: “He supervised the nutrition of the court, discussed food products with the monarch he served, and oversaw the proper functioning of the royal kitchen. He also invented new dishes for state functions and sometimes compiled collections of handwritten recipes.” I hope the master chef I have inserted into Jan Długosz’s Annals ably fulfills all these functions.

The title and first paragraph of what follows is a translation from Jan Długosz’s Annales seu cronicae incliti regni Poloniae, Liber Decimus 1370–1405 (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1985), 244–245. The rest is my own creation, an interpolation into the Annales in the voice of Jan Długosz to imagine what he might have written if he had written more about the wedding feast. It is intended to be as much a portrait of bigos as a portrait of the king’s anonymous master chef. It is also intended to prompt readers to consider what cultural and culinary history can contribute to the study of nascent nationalism in the late Middle Ages.

Notes

1. Unfortunately, no English translation of the Latin text exists. But, there is an abridged English translation of the Polish translation: Maurice Michael, trans., The Annals of Jan Długosz: An English Abridgement (Charlton, West Sussex: IM Publications, 1997).
2. Robert Frost, The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania: Volume I: The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385–1569 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),88-93.
3. There are three excellent online exhibits exploring the importance of food in medieval societies – the “Medieval Gastronomy” at the Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://expositions.bnf.fr/gastro/enimages/anglais/index.htm ; “Learning Texts in Context: Medieval Food” at the British Museum: www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/texts/cook/medieval/medieval2.html ; and “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry” at the Getty: www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/eat-drink-and-be-merry/QgKCWC1jiW-YLw
4. Czerniecki, Compendium Ferculorum, 87–8, 98, 100, 120–1, 124–5, 129, 133–4; and Jarosław Dumanowski, “Polish Cuisine, or Bigos with Cabbage,” which is part of the online exhibit of Stanisław Czerniecki’s Compendium Ferculorum at the Wilanów Palace Museum: www.wilanow-palac.pl/polish_cuisine_or_bigos_with_cabbage.html
5. Scully, Art of Cookery, 40–53. Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 50–60.
6. See, for example, Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony (New York: George Braziller, 1976), 20, 60.
7. See, for example, recipes 28–30 for veal, hare, and rabbit ragouts in Le Viandier de Taillevent’s recipes for “thick pottages”: www.telusplanet.net/public/prescotj/data/viandier/viandier415.html
8. For more on the displacement of medieval cuisine by this new French cuisine, see Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For seventeenth-century Western Europeans’ reactions to Polish food, see ibid., 125; Czerniecki, Compendium Ferculorum, 37; and Hanna Widacka, “Cuisine at the Court of Jan III Sobieski,” which is part of the online exhibit of Stanisław Czerniecki’s Compendium Ferculorum at the Wilanów Palace Museum: www.wilanow-palac.pl/cuisine_at_the_court_of_jan_iii_sobieski.html
9. Maria Dembińska, Food and Drink in Medieval Poland: Rediscovering a Cuisine of the Past. Revised and adapted by William Woys Weaver. Translated by Magdalena Thomas. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 134.
10. Dembińska, Food and Drink in Medieval Poland, 54–55.
11. If you would like to try to create your own version of medieval bigos, see William Woys Weaver’s recipe in Dembińska, Food and Drink in Medieval Poland, 169–170.