Bigos

My mother makes bigos the way her mother made it, from memory, without writing anything down, and every time she makes it it's the same. I've watched her do it probably twenty times and I still couldn't tell you the proportions. She doesn't measure. She goes by smell, by colour, by some internal calibration I apparently didn't inherit.

Last winter I decided to make it myself. I called her three times during the process. She gave me measurements I'm not sure she actually uses, because they produced something that tasted almost right but not quite, and she tasted it when she visited and said it was very good, which is how I knew something was wrong.

The recipe is somewhere in the difference between what she said and what she did. I'm going to keep making it until I find it.

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