Maria Korneitchik
Kyrgyzstan and the Cuisine of the Silk Road
Truly Nomadic Food
Unfold the map of Central Asia and place your finger in the middle. You are in Kyrgyzstan.
On three sides, north, west, and south, this little country of 560 by 250 miles (900 by 400 kilometers) is surrounded by three other former Soviet republics whose names also end in -stan — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tadjikistan. To the east is China, on the other side of a highly visible, natural border. To travel from one country to the other, you have to cross mountains, and then in China you face the extremes of the Taklamakan Desert, the country’s largest desert. Archaeologists who look there for treasures from buried cities have told me that their working time is limited to two months in spring and one in fall, the rest of the year being intolerable. Nor are the mountains easy. The ranges collectively called Tian Shan, shared with China, link up with the Pamir Mountains in the south of Kyrgyzstan. Ninety-four percent of Kyrgyzstan is higher than 1,000 meters, a third lies between 3,000 and 4,000 meters, and the highest peaks rise above 7,000 meters.
This is Kyrgyzstan, with its almost unpassable borders. And yet people did cross them for millennia. The country was on the Silk Road, and Kyrgyzstan is one of the rare sections that remains authentically itself. Whether that’s because of isolation or poverty — it was the poorest Soviet republic and things haven’t changed much — its ways of eating show almost no effect of globalization. At a time when cooking at home is growing rarer and rarer on our planet, food in Kyrgyzstan is still prepared at home. And it has changed little since the European explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries traversed the country and described its customs.
Last spring, I returned to Kyrgyzstan after a long absence, and I saw the same yurts in the jailoo (the high mountain pastures), the same dried cow and yak dung used to heat the kazans (the round-bottomed hemispheric cast-iron cauldrons used to cook almost everything), the same tulips of a dozen indigenous varieties in the pastures. Below the glaciers, the slopes were covered with wild apricot trees in bloom; there are six sorts of wild apricot and all six are found are Kyrgyzstan.
And of course, everywhere there were horses — herds of horses, riders from another century who even appear in cities, horses trotting along the highway. In front of a sinister Soviet-era building, a saddled horse tied and waiting quietly for his master. The Kyrgyz are nomads; horses are their life.
They are the only people in Asia who still keep this way of life, except for the Mongols, who are now almost sedentary. If in crossing Kyrgyzstan you look for architectural monuments, you will find only mosques built in the same manner as in neighboring countries or, similarly, Orthodox churches. Towns and cities appeared only after the country was colonized by the Russian Empire. Nomads don’t build much. Their wealth, preserved and venerated, is their mountains and lakes, their native plants and animals, and especially their horses. In other words, their greatest wealth is their means of transportation and their food.
You understood right; horse meat is the foundation of Kyrgyz cuisine. Even if lamb dominates the table in quantity, a dish of horse is what is prepared for a party and offered to guests.
Here, I think, a parenthesis is needed. Eating horse meat is not, or is no longer, part of Western culture. Even if the French were still eating it not a dozen years ago, the carved or painted horse heads that appear on the front of some butcher shops don’t mean much. Yes, in the Haute-Savoie they sell donkey sausage. And as much as it’s unthinkable for most English and Americans to eat rabbit, in Italy and France there are as many ways to prepare it as there are regions. And it’s impossible for me, having stayed in yurts and having cooked with Kyrgyz women and men, to talk about their cooking without talking about horse.
The nomadic cuisine is composed of meat and dairy products for obvious reasons. Raising animals is their source of livelihood. Cereals and vegetables have only a small place, acquired recently from neighboring peoples. Even before my trip, I dreaded the meaty abundance, especially since I was traveling with a vegetarian. What would he find to eat in the jailoo? Would there be any vegetables and fruits?
“Don’t worry, you will see on the spot, nothing will be missing,” I was reassured by Banura Abdieva, a defender of women’s rights, who is starting a movement of “clean tourism.” (Foreign companies are pushing the Kyrgyz government to exploit the country’s minerals, notably gold and uranium, as was done in the 1990s with significant environmental damage. Currently, the ecological movement has stopped new projects, especially around the great Lake Issyk-Kul. The Kyrgyz environmentalists want to make their country into the “Asian Switzerland” rather than into a source of minerals for foreigners. It remains the only democracy in the region, surrounded by dictatorships.)
Indeed, just outside the capital of Bishkek, a typical Soviet city of little interest, I found myself amidst vegetable gardens. The different varieties of cucumbers and radishes had tastes you don’t find in standardized industrial produce. The acid, the astringent, and above all the bitter have been banished from Western food, leaving harmlessly pleasant tastes. The small Kyrgyz cucumbers were bitter and their little bumps stung. The round radishes, big and rough with long, hard roots, made your tears flow as if you were eating horseradish. The peasants sold them along the roads, just as a month later they would sell cherries, apples, and apricots. In Kyrgyzstan, to accompany meat, there are always vegetarian salads, such as of cucumbers, radishes, pumpkin (raw and cooked), tomatoes, and potatoes.
But the products of vegetable gardens and orchards are not strictly part of the Kyrgyz way of eating. Growing fruits and especially vegetables is the prerogative of the Dungans, a Muslim people who moved from China to Kyrgyzstan in the 19th and 20th centuries, after persecution and massacres. They are known in Asia as excellent market gardeners. The great trading routes of Central Asia did not brew together just plants and goods, but also the men and women who carried them.
Within the small territory of Kyrgyzstan, 80 minorities live. Besides the dominant Kyrgyz, there are Kazakhs, their closest cousins, as well as Tajiks, Uzbeks, Persians, Koreans, Tatars, Hans, Russians, Ukrainians, Uighurs, Turks, Germans (Mennonites who came in the 19th century), and people deported during the Stalinist period, such as Dagestani, Karachai, and so many others. (Kyrgyz, like Kazakhs and Turks, are Turkophones.) Each brought its products, its ways of cooking, and its ways of eating.
But Kyrgyz cuisine dominates. And its king is beshbarmak, a meat dish with noodles and onions.
“Five fingers”
I admit that I approach the subject of beshbarmak with a certain dread. I once posted a recipe for it on social media, and nine out of ten people told me that it wasn’t right, that the shape of the noodles should be different, that the meat should not be presented like that.
The problem is that beshbarmak exists among several peoples of Central Asia; the Kazakhs or Bashkirs are also proud of their ways of preparing it. Yet after immersing myself in the descriptions left by the explorers of the region, I’ll risk saying that the recipe is first of all Kyrgyz and later spread through the region. Alexei Levshin, one of the first Russian linguists and explorers of Kyrgyzstan, agrees with this in his 1832 book, as does linguistic research from the beginning of the 20th century. Notably, Levshin says that the word beshbarmak is phonetically closer to the Kyrgyz language.
As a guest, I tasted beshbarmak made of horse with all the obligatory cuts, which I’ll discuss below. But horse lovers can rest assured that most of the time beshbarmak is made with lamb, or lamb mixed with beef or yak, animals the Kyrgyz also raise. The high quality of Kyrgyz lamb comes from a life spent above 3,000 meters, feeding on mountain pastures.
The name of the dish says a lot about its appearance and the way it’s eaten. Beshbarmak means “five fingers”: you eat it with your hands, without a fork or other utensil. So that can be done easily, and for tenderness, the meat must be sliced fine. The finesse of the cutting is the pride of the cook, and his disgrace when the cutting is coarse. All my hosts especially called my attention to the fact that their meat was sliced very fine. “If a man does not know how to do it, it’s because his father did not teach him,” one of them explained to me in a disapproving tone.
I say man and not woman, because the meat for beshbarmak is handled only by men; women make the fresh noodles that go with it. I don’t think the ritual connected with beshbarmak does anything to the taste, but it’s impossible to talk about beshbarmak without talking about all that surrounds it. Although this dish is not related to a religious holiday or a particular day of the year, it reflects customs lost in time. The nomadic women have always been in charge of setting up their homes on arrival in each location, and while they did that, the men cooked.
First, the meat is cooked gently for a long time in hardly enough water to cover it, so that the broth is as concentrated as possible. I have rarely seen so many aromatic mountain plants and herbs for sale as in the markets of Bishkek, the large southern city of Osh, and even small towns. They are richer in herbs than even the markets of Marrakesh or Istanbul.
You put in at a minimum several kinds of wild onions as well as a cultivated one, which the Kyrgyz call jusai. The name in English is Chinese chives, Chinese leeks, or Chinese garlic, a confusion that makes sense because the plant tastes of all three. Also put into the kazan are mint, bay leaves, thyme, and ziziphora, a plant whose leaves and flowers have a strong odor that slightly recalls mint.
As soon as you skim off the foam, you begin to remove the fat that also rises. That’s what is used to cook the chak, the onion sauce. The cooking is always done in the kazan that you see in each yurt and in the courtyards of the houses. The kazan, with sheep fat in the bottom, is also used to fry meat.
The cuts of meat for beshbarmak are chosen carefully. What traditionally goes into the broth is: a hip bone, a main vertebra, a leg bone, shoulder blade, a section of backbone, the neck fat (previously salted), as well as the ribs with their meat (previously salted and dried, a bit like the meat of grisons in the Alps). It is these pieces that after cooking will be so finely sliced. Another ingredient that goes into the kazan is horse sausage. Although the rest of the meat is typically lamb, the sausage is mainly horse. There are several kinds — kazy, chouchouk, and more.
For chouchouk, you mix the fat of the ribs with hot pepper and sometimes other flavorings, and fill the intestines. For kazy, the preparation is a more subtle art because the entire rib bone enters the intestine with the stuffing placed around it, so the sausage is shaped in an arc. Or you can take the meat from the bone, unchopped, with its fat, and then stuffing is added to fill the intestine. The kazy and chouchouk can be cooked directly in broth but also salted and dried or even smoked beforehand. Another type of sausage is karta, which is made of the large intestine of the animal turned inside out, so the fat on the outside is now inside, and then it is filled with stuffing. It is served cooked.
All the offal and tripe also appear in the broth. Only the head is cooked beforehand, separately. First, the horns (if an older animal) and teeth are removed, leaving the brain, cartilage, and lower jaw with the tongue, then the head is singed over the open fire, and then it is cooked in broth. It’s a relative of the calf’s head so much appreciated by the French.
Then come the oustakans, which is another word you have to know if you want to understand beshbarmak. I’ve already said that meat must be sliced as finely as possible. The 18th-century sources say that the Kyrgyz themselves put the meat in the mouths of their guests. Fortunately, this tradition is completely over. In contrast to the parts of the animal I’ve already named, the oustakans are big pieces of meat on the bone. They are cooked with the rest, and after everything else has been eaten, they are divided among those at the table according to their age and social importance. The guest of honor, if a man, is given the hip bone and, if a woman, the tender, gelatinous shank. Among other distinguished parts, I saw morsels of leg meat, the knuckle at the bottom of the leg, the saddle, the best parts of the shoulder and the neck.
The noodles made by the women are put in the broth last, to cook with the rest. These are fresh egg noodles such as you encounter in China and somewhat throughout Asia. The form in Kyrgyzstan is variable. Often the noodles are long strips one centimeter (about one-half inch) wide, but they can be small squares, lozenges, or the dough may even remain a large whole sheet (a sort of a round lasagna). Whatever the form, the noodles are cooked in the meat broth. When the beshbarmak is served, in individual bowls, first the pasta goes in, then the sliced meat, and then the onions and the oustakans.
The rest of the lamb is presented on a large platter along with pieces of kazy, the grilled liver, and the boiled tongue. The most exotic moment comes when the head, on which remains a little meat, arrives on another large platter. It usually goes to the youngest at the table, “so that he can grow smart.”
Judging by all the beshbarmak that I tasted, it’s not mandatory to put the meat on the pasta with the sauce on top. I’ve seen the onions mixed directly with the noodles and the meat in the kazan. Sometimes the boiled and sliced meat is fried in the sheep fat with jusai and bay leaves, which releases the bay aroma much more intensely than if it is put in the broth. And the ancestor of the beshbarmak, the naaryn, which is almost the same, did not contain pasta at all. It’s a more purely nomadic dish, since nomads didn’t raise grain to make noodles.
The onions
You may remember that at the beginning of the preparation of beshbarmak, the fat that rose from the broth was set aside for the onions. The white bulbs of the several kinds of onions are chopped or sliced in rounds and cooked in the fat long enough to begin to melt. The only other ingredients are salt, black pepper, and red pepper, meaning capsicum pepper, which can be very hot, or not.
You eat sitting on the floor on a carpet, with the dishes placed on the dastarkhan, the tablecloth, which is laid over the carpet. But as the beshbarmak requires a certain amount of time to prepare, you don’t let the guests starve. Why not serve them another dish of meat?
That’s what is usually done: the women prepare and serve kuurdak, a dish of fried meat. And the guest who doesn’t yet realize that a further huge dish awaits will certainly succumb to the temptation of roasted tripe in the kazan with onion and caraway seeds. As well as some ribs. Next time, he will definitely remember.
Kurut, the only Kyrgyz cheese
In addition to the onions, a sauce arrives to go with the beshbarmak. It is made from kurut, which is the only Kyrgyz cheese.
Anyone who has ever eaten cheese in his life would never think of calling this product by that name. Kurut is shaped like golf balls and is just as hard. Eating it, in the normal sense of eating, is impossible; you could break your teeth. The deportees from Russia to Kyrgyzstan during the Stalinist years said that, after an inhuman journey and having finally arrived to perform hard labor in the camps, they were distraught by the severe reception of the local population: the Kyrgyz women threw some sort of white stones at them. What appeared initially to be a hostile gesture proved to be a valuable help. The stones were balls of kurut that saved the lives of the underfed prisoners.
Kurut can be made from any kind of milk — cow, sheep, goat, mare, and even camel. The intermediate preparation is katyk, fermented milk. But unlike most fermented milk from Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, katyk is made from cooked milk, so it is fatter and thicker, because some of the liquid has evaporated. The fermentation lasts about 6 to 10 hours at a temperature that can range from 20 to 40 degrees C (68 to 104 degrees F).
Then the preparation is suspended in gauze to drain in the shade for a few days. You see these purse shapes hanging in the courtyards of houses, under seasonal roofs, or in sheds. You can eat the katyk as it is or put it in salads, but only for the first two days. After that it hardens more and more and becomes more acidic, and then it is added to rich meat broths.
The liquid that emerges from the katyk as it drains is called suzma. The suzma is salted; it dries and concentrates, until the women, using their hands, roll it into balls or sometimes small cylinders. Another way to make kurut is to cook the suzma, drain it, and — this time without salt — dry it in the sun for a few days.
The harder kurut is, the easier it is to carry. It’s an ideal nomadic dish, very nourishing, and it keeps for years. For long hours of the day, I was told by the Kyrgyz who go to the summer pastures of the jailoo, in the past it was enough to suck a ball to no longer be hungry.
And, of course, kurut goes into beshbarmak, added along with garlic and dissolved in the broth. The cheese’s acid is supposed to help in the digestion of the fat and meat.
Muuzduu and other olobo
Beshbarmak is the king of the Kyrgyz table, but the meat dishes do not stop there. There are at least 20 more, and it took imagination to invent that many using almost the same set of ingredients. The varied techniques help to give further tastes.
Take goulazyk. The meat is boiled and then dried, then reduced to almost a powder, which is mixed with spices and grains (the latter previously grilled and dried); everything together is reduced to a rough powder. This is another very old nomadic dish, prepared by boiling meat broth and adding the goulazyk powder.
Muuzduu is the cartilage of the lamb throat that you grill on the coals. The breast is prepared in the same way, as well as the brain. Olobo is lamb lungs marinated in a mixture of milk, butter, and spices — only for guests of honor. Byzy is tripe mixed with stuffing, including rice, inside a stomach, like a sort of haggis. To make tach-kordo, a well-washed stomach, lamb or sometimes goat, is filled with pieces of meat and surrounded by the large leaves of burdock, a vegetable ignored in Europe and America but used in Japan. Everything goes into a hole dug in the ground, which is paved over with stones and covered with sand. A fire is built on top that burns for five to six hours. You must not dig up the stomach for another two hours, while the cooking is completed.
Pilaf
Although beshbarmak reigns over all of northern Kyrgyzstan and is the proud national dish, it loses some of its power in the south in favor of pilaf. Pilaf, or really pilafs, because the varieties are numerous, doesn’t come from Kyrgyz cuisine. It was borrowed from the neighboring Tajiks and Uzbeks, but it has been prepared and consumed in Kyrgyzstan for at least five centuries.
The storyteller-singers who transmit the nation’s legends and epics, accompanying them on a long-handled lute, recount that in the 16th century the Khan Shardybek had a young wife that he loved very much, and he placed her on 40 feather beds and fed her pilaf prepared with the bone marrow of 40 black sheep. Shardybek was a genuine historical figure of the 16th century, and if the legend contains some truth, then pilaf may already have been part of Kyrgyz cuisine in his day.
Nomads carry their dishes with them, and others who joined them on the Silk Road brought theirs. So the Uighur lagman is very much appreciated in Kyrgyzstan as is the Dungan ashlyam-fu. The first is a dish of pulled noodles with meat and vegetables (carrots, eggplant, others, and always jusai). But in this carnivorous country, both lagman and ashlyam-fu are suitable for vegetarians, because the first can be done with vegetables only, and the second never contains meat.
Phonetically, ashlyam-fu appears to be Chinese, but you don’t find exactly the same thing in China. It’s a cold soup with pasta: cornstarch is cooked, cooled, and rolled thin like lasagna, and then cut narrow like linguine; it is very, very white, like the white of an egg. The liquid is highly spicy thanks to the hot pepper mixed in sunflower oil and garlic. A sour taste comes from vinegar (Chinese vinegar, milder than European), and the color is very dark, because the vinegar is heated with oil and a little sugar, which gives the soup a slight taste and color of caramel. Also part of ashlyam-fu are jusai and eggs, often in the form of a broken-up omelette. Variations are numerous.
Ashlyam-fu comes from Karakol, a town on the western end of Lake Issyk-Kul. The Kyrgyz unanimously say you must taste it there among the Dungans, because it is their dish. The Kyrgyz know the dish isn’t Kyrgyz in origin, but they nonetheless consider it theirs by adoption. In the same way, they have adopted pilaf and even manty, which are very large ravioli made from an extremely thin dough stuffed with meat, spinach, or pumpkin and steamed. These come from the Mongols and other Siberian peoples. I believe the nomadic mentality makes it easy to assimilate the cuisine of others encountered along the route; the notion of territory loses its meaning with nomadism.
Ashlyam-fu is spread all through the country. It’s an ideal street food, very good, and very refreshing in hot weather. There’s no need to heat anything; the different ingredients are assembled directly in front of you according to your taste.
Koumiss, the drink of warriors
Noodles, herbs, lamb… But the horse is never far from the Kyrgyz table. If not its meat, then its milk. From the time I was a child in Russia, I always heard that the Kyrgyz are fed mare’s milk starting at an early age. To it was attributed almost a sort of magic, seeing the skills of the Kyrgyz riders, although the skills really come from living in the open air, continuous exercise, and practice. Mare’s milk has much less fat and protein than cow’s milk but much more lactose.
The common drink, however, is not the milk itself but koumiss — mare’s milk fermented by lactic acid bacteria. Koumiss is as much a symbol of Kyrgyzstan as beshbarmak, if not more so. Kyrgyz legends present it as the warrior’s drink that can defeat any enemy.
In Kyrgyzstan, it’s impossible to avoid tasting koumiss. At farms or in yurts, in alpine pastures or along roads, you will be offered different kinds of this milk-colored beverage, strongly gasified by fermentation. Depending on how much time has passed, the alcohol is from 0.2 to 4.5 percent. The weakest is given to children and the elderly for better digestion and to protect against all kinds of flu-like conditions, sore throats, or other colds. Koumiss is considered a panacea.
It’s over 5,500 years old. The earliest traces of fermented mare’s milk have been found in goat’s-leather cantle bags attached to the saddles of horsemen in the Suusamyr Valley of the Tian Shan, inside Kyrgyzstan, by a 2017 expedition of the Russian Institute of Archeology. Equally old traces of fermented mare’s milk have been found by a British expedition and by a French team. Of course, there was no Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan then, but Kyrgyz migrated through this very territory. In European sources, Herodotus in his Histories speaks of koumiss in the 5th century BCE, saying that the Scythian horsemen guarded the secret of its preparation so preciously that they blinded every slave who participated in its making. French missionaries (notably the Franciscan monk Guillaume de Rubrouck in the 13th century) and Russian explorers mentioned many times that the Kyrgyz kept the secret very carefully. The Persian Avicenna mentions it, too, a thousand years ago. And Tolstoy and Chekov made cures with koumiss.
The milking of the mare takes place through the day at intervals of an hour, because the small udder gives only one liter of milk each time and five liters in all. The foal must first start to suckle or the mother will not allow herself to be milked. Then the foal is brought grass, while a woman starts milking. Of course, it’s a seasonal product, from late April to September, when the mares go up into the summer pastures and give birth.
The koumiss ferments in a wooden vessel 20 to 40 cm wide by a meter tall (8 to 16 inches by 39 inches), which tapers to the top and closes with a lid. (It’s the shape of some old European and American butter churns, and Russian ones, which might be the origin.) In the vessel is a little koumiss from the last time, which mixes with the fresh mare’s milk. The middle of the lid has a hole for a stick with a cross at the lower end. For two days, from time to time, you beat the liquid with the help of the cross. Sometimes a little smoked horse fat is added, and then the new koumiss tastes a little less acidic and has a small smoky accent.
I also saw koumiss fermented inside a goatskin bag, the original container, ideally suited to nomadic life, but that has become extremely rare. A stronger smoked taste comes from the fact that every two to three weeks, perhaps to preserve the vessel or prevent microbial problems, the wood or skin is emptied, washed, and smeared with butter to smoke it from the inside with birch bark and leaves of filipendula, a pleasant plant with a slight taste of honey. (The Kyrgyz also combine filipendula with tea and infuse them together.)
You can’t keep koumiss — it’s a living product. So much alive that on the third day after buying a plastic bottle of it, we witnessed a demonstration of its vitality. Unhappy to be shaken about in the car, the koumiss broke through its container, coming out like a geyser and spraying the whole interior of the car with the mixed aromas of smoke, acid, and milk. That was an aggressive combination, and yet koumiss has a pleasant taste that refreshes, an important quality during the Central Asian summer. The independent character of the drink precludes industrial production; it cannot be transported, it can only be local.
Kyrgyzstan has other drinks that are amazing both in their tastes and the ways they are prepared. Maksym is made from barley, first grilled and then ground into coarse flour, and then put in hot salted water and left to ferment with the remains of the previous batch, which acts as a starter. It is ready ten hours later and can only be drunk after that time. For more bubbles, you add a little koumiss. It’s a pleasing sparkling drink sold on city streets on hot days.
Bozo, a product of millet fermentation, is not strictly Kyrgyz but also very much present in the country. It was surely borrowed from other Turkic peoples at some point in nomadic history.
Delicious airan is also widespread throughout Central Asia and among the Turks, in the Caucasus, and in the Balkans. It’s less exotic, being fermented cow’s milk. Sometimes, for a better fermentation, coarsely ground barley is added. The difference is that the Kyrgyz airan is not at all liquid but very thick, which again reflects the nomadic life. It’s easier to transport over long distances. And if you’re thirsty, no problem, you dilute it with water… or koumiss!
Barley and millet
What about grains? Nomads neither plant nor harvest. But since the beginning of the 19th century and especially during the Soviet era, the Kyrgyz began to spend part of the year not in yurts but in houses built in the style of Russians or Ukrainians, who brought their customs with them when they colonized the territory. Passing through Kyrgyz villages takes you back to 19th-century Russia — izbas, rustic wooden houses with decorative window casings, surrounded by fields. The great Soviet Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov describes wheat production during the era of collective farms, but wheat never really replaced the local barley and millet. It was just added to them, and even the trio of cereals hasn’t achieved the importance of meat.
Bread, however, appears on every table; it’s often called by the Russian name pirojki, but it has nothing to do with that filled bread. The kinds of Kyrgyz bread are a huge subject. They are made in different round, flat or somewhat flat shapes, leavened or not, filled with jusai or not, commonly distinguished by beautiful designs stamped into the dough. Each house makes its own bread, which is always fresh. For some families, it is a source of income. Several times we gave a ride to women who were taking their bread to a neighboring bazaar; each insisted on thanking us by giving us a still-warm loaf.
One kind of bread, or really doughnut, has become a symbol of the national cuisine almost on a par with beshbarmak and koumiss. Baoursacs are small pieces of leavened dough fried in sheep fat in the kazan. The dough is made with barley or wheat flour mixed with airan as leavening, and with cow’s milk, a little sugar, salt, and sometimes an egg. The dough is cut into small triangles or lozenge shapes and thrown into a mixture of sunflower oil and mutton fat. The baoursacs turn a reddish color and are done immediately; you must eat them hot. In a yurt, they’re the first thing that welcomes visitors.
The baoursacs are placed around one of the great samovars — no longer seen in Russia, but they have found a second home in Kyrgyzstan. Every family has one. The Western division between salty and sweet does not exist. Placed on the table at the same time are logs of thin dough rolled up with vegetables (another vegetarian dish!), jams of black currants and of hippophae — the most cultivated berries in Kyrgyzstan — and honey from the heights of the jailoo. And tea is brewed with berries, leaves, and herbs, with lemon balm, ginger, several kinds of mint, everlasting, hawthorn, wild raspberry, and so many other mountain and valley plants. All to be consumed while you wait for the beshbarmak, of course. ●
From issue 104