I’ve gotten some questions about food here in Azerbaijan, both in emails and on this blog, and I always like learning about food in different cultures (I took a Food and Culture anthropology course in college, for instance), so here we go.
First, the mundane; breakfast and lunch. Breakfast every morning, courtesy of my host mother, is a cup of tea, two scrambled eggs (sometimes with cut up hot dogs or some sort of ground meat called “cutlet”), and bread with butter and “cheese.” It’s not a sort of cheese I’m used to, and boy do I miss cheddar and mozzarella cheeses. For lunch every day, my host mother makes me a sandwich from half a round loaf of bread (picture a half circle of bread the size of dinner plate), with a slit cut into it stuffed with chopped up tomatoes, cucumber, and some sort of meat. Sometimes it’s hot dogs, sometimes it’s the ground meat from breakfast, sometimes it’s leftovers.
Azerbaijani food is often delicious, but doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of variety. A lot of food is cooked in oil, butter, or fat. I’ve heard about people who keep pots of fat beneath their sinks to use on the skillet when cooking. Sometimes it can be too much, just because of the regularity of the presence of oil and not a whole lot of other tastes or spices. Every now and then there’ll be some spiciness to foods, like one soup my family made me that had chicken and potatoes in it, but it’s kind of hard to tell what it’s name is when there are a lot of soups that have chicken (or other kinds of meat) and potatoes in them. Another soup, kifta, is large meatballs and potatoes in an oily broth.
One of my favorite dishes is called dolma. Dolma is meat and rice either wrapped up in cabbage leaves or grape vine leaves, or stuffed in peppers and tomatoes. The wrappings are then steamed. Dolma is exciting because there are several varities.
Another dish that I really like is called xengal (pronounced hain-gall), though it is one of the particularly oily ones. Flat noodles like you’d use for lasagna are cooked in oil and then topped with ground beef, and served with a yogurt topping. It’s not the sort of yogurt one would get at home, but more like the yogurt in India. Thinking about yogurt makes me miss the flavored frozen yogurt with cookie dough and chocolate chips and mochi that I had in LA this summer.
Right, back to Azerbaijani food. The main drawback, as I’ve said, is the general, stereotypical, lack of spiciness. It’s tasty but not always very exciting. I gave my family some Old Bay as a present, with which at first they didn’t quite know what to do. However, every now and then they’ll put it on the table, though I think that’s mostly meant for me. We’ve been told that part of the reason for this is because people don’t like to cover up or obscure the taste of the meat or vegetables.
Kebab is popular here, meaning meat that is cooked on a stick though served sans stick. Doner, which is a chunk of meat on a stick which people then cut shavings off of and put into sandwich bread with some onions and tomatoes is another popular dish, and is often available on the street (it’s also nice because they actually have condiments which they add to the sandwich so it’s more than just bread).
Pirashkis are a wonderful invention. My family made homemade pirashkis a few weeks ago, and they were godly. Fried dough with potatoes (sometimes meat) cooked into them. Reminds me of paranthas in India when made at the house, but on the street they’re fried doughy bread straight out of the state fair.
On the less appetizing side of things, I recently ate stomach. It was in a dish called qutab (pronounced with a “g”), which is basically a tortilla with something fried into it a la my old favorite tortilla-cheese rollups. This one had stomach and pomegranate seeds in it. While not as bad as I had expected, it definitely had a distinct taste. On the plus side, there was also a qutab that had butternut squash in it. Where they found the butternut squash, I don’t know, I haven’t seen any at the market. I’ve had some other organs, including, I’m guessing, heart and liver. We had a dish that was heart and liver and potatoes, and I will say this, the potatoes were delicious.
Meat here is considered expensive, compared to fruits and vegetables, though with those you have to hit them at the right season for the best prices. Because of the expense of meat, a number of volunteers have become basically vegetarian once they move out of their host families’ houses. Also, families will often buy meat in order to show that they are feeding their guest well, and as such, my family has had meat in almost all dishes. Fat is also seen as a positive thing, and at a recent meal, we had a very good soup, with pieces of beef that had a considerable amount of fat on them. When they asked why I hadn’t eaten much of the fat, I told them I didn’t like fat, and my host father declared that he did, and he took the items off my hands.
The dreaded xash, which is boiled cow or sheep head, but some in our group have. One person even was served it for breakfast. Still, there a number of butcher shops between my host family’s house and the schools where I have lessons, and I’ve seen my share of severed cow’s heads. Appetizing, non?
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