Food And Drink

"Bigos is one of those Polish dishes that has been romanticized in poetry, discussed in its most minute details in all sorts of literary contexts, and never made in small quantities. ... In the manor house where my grandfather was born, the bigos was kept warm in a compartment in the great tile stove that heated the parlor where guests were received. It was handed out as a welcoming snack served on poppy seed toast, along with a glass of iced vodka or champagne. While Polish villagers often make a plain version of bigos in huge cauldrons over an open fire for wedding feasts, real bigos is best when it is baked very slowly at a low temperature in a ceramic pot. The evaporation alone should be enough to thicken it. Furthermore, it should not be served until at least one day old, preferably three: it needs time for the flavors to fuse into a highly complex and concentrated taste."

"On a general note, I've got to tell you that this sloppy language makes our constitution something akin to paltry bigos made from rotten ham, half-rotten fatback and half-cured sauerkraut; so that each paragraph and article may and should be read completely on its own, without linking it with any other article. Naturally, the rotten ham is for Mr. President, the half-rotten fatback is for the cabinet, and the members of parliament are left with the half-cured sauerkraut. As you can see, there's nothing their stomachs can do and what comes out is stench, so that all of Wiejska Street [where the Polish parliament is located] reeks. And the only way out of this chaos is to rewrite the constitution in a decent way. What's more, nobody has the right to interpret the constitution. Interpretation is forbidden – so the state is left with nothing but bigos."

"There used to be three phases of arriving at a political decision in the Polish diet. The first phase was that of presenting views. Everyone could present any opinion they wanted. Then came the grinding phase. ... Grinding as in a great mortar, where you grind until you produce a uniform mass. Opinions were ground through a long-term discussion. But if this didn't help and if at least one person remained unconvinced or opposed, then he could take the floor of the Polish parliament, shout liberum veto and scurry away – thus dissolving the diet. So the Polish nobility came up with a third phase: it was the phase of making bigos. ... Bigos is a peculiar dish: shredded cabbage and chopped meat stewed for a long time. So the third phase – that of making bigos – meant that the rash nobles would grab their sabres and hack him to pieces, the one who upset the government, who upset the law, before he could get away."

"— How are you, old rogue? Why twist your nose as if you had found some unvirtuous odor? — In the whole camp of Sapieha it smells of bigos! — Why bigos? Tell me! — Beacuse the Swedes have cut up a great many cabbage heads!"

"Before they got to Żółtańce, Dub stopped the car twice and after the last stop he said doggedly to Biegler: 'For lunch I had bigos cooked the Polish way. From the battalion I shall make a complaint by telegram to the brigade. The sauerkraut was bad and the pork was not fit for eating. The insolence of these cooks exceeds all bounds. Whoever doesn't yet know me, will soon get to know me.'"

"When the bigos was gone, guests scraped their plates, proving once again, as Nela said, there is "nothing better than a big pot of savory bigos.""

"Until now I was under the false impression that the Polish national dish was bigos, an exquisite stew of cabbage heads, bitter hearts and virulent liver, a dish full of acids and pungent smells. Someone would always "cook bigos" [i.e., make a mess] for somebody else, then they would slap one another in the face, in a newspaper or in a café, and life, replete with rosy cheeks, temperament and fulsomeness, was beautiful. It saddens me, though, to see that tradition fades, as does the noble dish of bigos, and it is beef tongue in the Polish style that now reigns supreme in the Polish menu. Bigos was an exuberant dish, announcing itself through its scent from afar, juicy and vigorous. Tongue in the Polish style is more intricate, sweetened with almonds and raisins; it is, indeed, the dumbest part of a thoughtless beast, but the sweetness of its seasoning is ineffably appetizing."

"In the pots warmed the bigos; mere words cannot tell Of its wondrous taste, colour and marvellous smell. One can hear the words buzz, and the rhymes ebb and flow, But its content no city digestion can know. To appreciate the Lithuanian folksong and folk food, You need health, live on land, and be back from the wood. 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. Now the bigos is ready. 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."

"One of the nobles had a box full of bigos. This thing, though tasty, is very hard to digest; bigos without vodka is sure to make you sick. Recently, Paul, when getting ready to go into the field, had some bigos, but didn't drink his vodka; he got such a stomach ache, they had to cure him with chamomile tea."

"Bigos, steaks, cutlets, pancakes, vols-au-vent, beef olives, brains, game and fruits make a light and nutritious breakfast."

"Turkey in sauce, steak and bigos The lords of yore did munch; But nowadays, it's worms and snails On which, like storks, they lunch."

"In the meantime, Gaudentius, who didn't fail to make provisions for the journey with leftovers from the feast of Yasnohorod, reheated and consumed bigos, generously seasoned with sausages and fatback, which he had retrieved from a box, washing it down, in strictly calculated intervals, with ample doses of vodka, which he kept by his right-hand side in a large rectangular decanter. ... Bigos, as is known, induces great thirst, which had to be quenched with some concoction; nearby, at Finke's, this and other "remedies" were ready for savoring. This venture, undertaken with certain tact, yet amateurishly, took quite some time; it had been over an hour since the sun left the earthly horizon, when Mr. Pius, with the last drops from the last bottle, exorcised the effects of the greasy bigos."

"The causes for the continual difference in taste of the dish are unclear. They have not been determined to this day, in part because the investigators usually lean back sluggishly, burp quietly, think a bit, and silently reach out with their soup dish for seconds. After that, there is sex and sleep. Sex after a couple of bowls of borsch is particularly good. Sleep with a borsch aftertaste in the mouth is also sweet. It is because of this that investigators cannot finish researching the delights of the flavor varieties of borsch – the flavors are infinite. In the course of my life I have cooked borsch more than one thousand times, each one tasting different."

"Borsch, like Buddhism, is perfectly suited to a global culture. In each, within a global phenomenon local variants are so numerous and diverse that it is hard sometimes for a non-specialist to grasp that any single example of it is something that is part of a unified tradition. Borsch is an almost perfect example of the recently coined term "glocalization" – a phenomenon that is global in distribution but reflective of local needs and ways in its variants and adaptation. One way that borsch differs from the standard conept of "glocalization" is that, unlike modern counterparts that begin as global initiatives and then are adapted to local conditions, borsch was a highly localized product that became globalized, and in the process adapted to conditions other than the original ones."

"Take Galina Onischenko's version of the eastern European staple. "This is Russian borscht," she said, setting down a porcelain bowl of "green" or summer borscht with its dill-flecked mosaic of beets, carrots, and potatoes. "No lard with garlic like they put in Ukrainian borscht.""

"Winchell: I can only assume that you think this is blood, Al. And if I had an IQ below 24, I suppose I might think the same. But the stain in this cap comes from borscht."

"One could understand and forgive foreigners for calling borscht or varenyky Russian national dishes, but when it turns out that they gleaned this information from Soviet cookbooks or from restaurant menus, one is embarrassed for our authors and chefs, who popularize the national cuisines of our peoples [i.e., the various ethnic groups of the Soviet Union] with such ignorance."

"Recipes, like birds, ignore political boundaries. Just as the British empire still has a culinary pulse, beating in a curry in Scotland or in the mug of builder's tea with sugar and milk you are handed in some roadhouse on the Karakorum Highway; just as the Ottoman empire breathes phantom breaths in little cups of muddy coffee from Thessaloniki to Basra; so the faint outline of the Tsarist-Soviet imperium still glimmers in the collective steam off bowls of beetroot and cabbage in meat stock, and the soft sound of dollops of sour cream slipping into soup, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan and, in emigration, from Brooklyn to Berlin."

": Gdy zaprosi oboje na barszczyk;"

": W barszczu będą trujące dwa grzyby"

": I na twarzy się nawet nie zmarszczy,"

": I otruje niechcący ich niby."

"Nikanor Ivanovich poured himself a glass of vodka, drank it down, poured another, drank that down, picked up three pieces of herring with his fork... And at that moment the doorbell rang and Pelageya Antonovna brought in a steaming pot, one glance at which was enough to guess that the pot contained, in the very thick of the piping hot borscht, the most delicious thing in the world – a marrow bone."

"And she wouldn't even frown when she invited them both for a borscht; in this borscht there were two poisonous mushrooms and she poisoned them, seemingly by accident."

"Thick borscht, frequent guests and coarse salt are a farmer's ruin."

"Where there are borscht and cabbage, the cottage is never deserted."

"Tart borscht and holy earth each support a man."

"Without bread, it's no lunch; without cabbage, it's no borscht."

"Borscht without porridge is a widower; porridge without borscht is a widow."

"Cheap like borscht."

"The inhabitants [of Krementschuk] live almost entirely on flesh; it rarely happens that they have fish or vegetables to be served on their tables. They have a kind of soup, however, which is made of groats and vegetables, of which they are very fond: this soup is rather sour, and is called borsch, from the name of the carrot which is boiled in it."

"One doesn't eat borscht with an awl."

"Borscht and porridge are our food."

"The men were given vodka; and all took their seat,"

"After a few hours travelling from the mountains down towards Poland, I finally reached a Polish border checkpoint and, kissing the ground of my native land, I shed sweet tears of joy. There, a Polish guard (...) treated me to a Polish dinner where I gladly welcomed the coveted national borscht (...)"

"One pitch-dark rainy night we landed about ten o'clock at the mouth of a salmon stream when the water was phosphorescent. The salmon were running, and the myriad fins of the onrushing multitude were churning all the stream into a silvery glow, wonderfully beautiful and impressive in the ebon darkness."

"Gene Ray: Another thing, did you know your father is a fish?"

"In the swirl of its pool the home-coming salmon has no intuition of anything changed."

"There is a river in Macedon; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth;... and there is salmons in poth."

"The only people who wear salmon are gay men and…salmon."

"[W]hen you look at the whole thing you don't try to count the scales on the salmon, of course you don't. You see them as little silver pearls against grey and pink – isn't that right? – look at the pink of the salmon, with the bone appearing white in the centre and then grays, like the shades of mother of pearl."

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street,I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky."

"The salmon swimming upstream to spawn may be wily in a hundred ways, but she cannot even contemplate the prospect of abandoning her reproductive project and deciding instead to live out her days studying coastal geography or trying to learn Portuguese."

"Far out beyond the surf they felt it. Beyond the reach of any canoe, half a sea away, something stirred inside them, an ancient clock of bone and blood that said, "It’s time." Silver-scaled body its own sort of compass needle spinning in the sea, the floating arrow turned toward home. From all directions they came, the sea a funnel of fish, narrowing their path as they gathered closer and closer, until their silver bodies lit up the water, redd-mates sent to sea, prodigal salmon coming home."

"Down in a valley, by a forest side, Near where the crystal Thames rolls on her waves, I saw a mushroom stand in haughty pride, As if the lillies grew to be his slaves; The gentle daisy, with her silver crown, Worn in the breast of many a shepherd’s lass; The humble violet, that lowly down, Salutes the gay nymphs as they trimly pass; Those, with a many more, methought complain’d That Nature should those needless things produce, Which not alone the Sun from others gain’d, But turn it wholely to their proper use: I could not choose but grieve, that Nature made Such glorious flowers to live in such a shade."

"If you think about stories like Alice in Wonderland or other types of fairy tales, mushrooms always seem to have a kind of mysterious power."

"All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut."

"The thievish jay Seeking her food, with ease might have purloined The auburn nut that held thee, swallowing down Thy yet close-folded latitude of boughs And all thine embryo vastness at a gulp. But fate thy growth decreed"

"He that would eat the kernel must crack the nut."

"The bodie bigge, and mightely pight, Thoroughly rooted, and of wond'rous hight; Whilome had bene the king of the field, And mochell mast to the husband did yielde, And with his nuts larded many swine."