🇰🇬 The cattle breeds of Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan's cattle keep a low profile beside the sheep and horses of its nomadic kitchen. Beef is one of the country's two favourite meats, boiled into beshbarmak, grilled as shashlik and fried into paloo, and it appears at births, birthdays and funerals. Dairy, though, leans on mares and ewes.

• Beef ranks with mutton as the favourite meat of Kyrgyz cooking, though many cannot afford it often.
• Beshbarmak, the national dish, pairs boiled beef with hand-made noodles.
• Shashlik can be beef, grilled with a one-to-one ratio of fat to meat.
• Butter, called sary may, and kaymak are the dairy dips for Kyrgyz bread.
• Paloo fries beef with carrots and rice in a qazan, a cast-iron cauldron.

Cattle in Kyrgyzstan

Cattle play a modest part in Kyrgyzstan's kitchen, which centres on the sheep and the horse of its nomadic past. Beef still counts, alongside mutton, as a favourite meat, and it threads through the cooking: boiled over noodles in beshbarmak, grilled on shashlik skewers, folded into dumplings and fried into paloo, the Kyrgyz take on pilaf. Dairy, by contrast, leans on other animals: mare's milk becomes the summer drink kymyz, sheep's milk is dried into qurut, while butter and kaymak appear simply as spreads for bread. The cuisine as a whole sits close to that of its neighbours, and in cities such as Bishkek, Osh and Karakol beef shares the table with Uyghur, Dungan, Uzbek and Turkish dishes.

Milk, butter and beef

Beef is the clearest gift of the cow to the Kyrgyz table. It shares beshbarmak, the national dish, with horse meat and mutton, boiling for hours in its own broth before being shredded over hand-made noodles. Skewers of shashlik may be beef, often with equal parts fat and meat; kuurdak, dimlama and paloo also take beef, the last fried with carrots and rice in a qazan, a cast-iron cauldron. Manty and samsa, the steamed dumplings and pastry pockets of the bazaars, can be filled with beef among other meats. On the dairy side, kaymak and sary may, the local word for butter, serve as dips for bread, while qurut comes from sheep's milk.

Festivals, fairs and faith

Kyrgyz feasting runs on meat, and beef stands ready beside mutton and horse meat. Beshbarmak, whose name means five fingers and which is eaten by hand, is cooked for the great family occasions: the birth of a child, an important birthday, a funeral or its anniversary. When mutton stands in for horse meat, a boiled sheep's head goes before the guest of honour, who shares portions round the table. This is feast custom rather than a cattle festival, but it marks where beef carries weight in Kyrgyz life.

Today

Cost, not custom, now limits beef: in modern times many Kyrgyz cannot afford mutton or beef as a regular meal, so both remain celebration food for many households. City eating has widened, with the larger towns offering national and international cooking alongside the old dishes. The traditional drinks that fill out the table, from kymyz to bozo, are now bottled commercially as well as made at home.