How I Came to Eat Xash

My family tricked me. Seriously, I saw it coming, I knew it was happening, and they still tricked me. I have eaten xash.

Here’s how it happened. I first knew something might happen at breakfast, when my host father asked if I had eaten xash before. I could have sworn I’d already talked to them about this, and noted my distaste. Xash, for those who don’t know, is essentially boiled cow head meat. Sometimes you get the whole head, sometimes meat from the head. In Xirdalan, I had been served xash for dinner one evening; straight fatty meat in broth that brought to mind Hot Ham Soup from Arrested Development. In a pot nearby, the bones of the cow’s skull still stewed. After a few sips of the broth, I begged off and was given scrambled eggs or something equally non-threatening.

So he asked, and again I said that I didn’t like the stuff, and the conversation shifted. The hair on the back of my neck straightened a bit, but I let it go. Lunch was a normal meal that day, and I came home from classes and waited for dinner. I sat down and my bowl was already at my place. My father and brother had already started eating, so I “nush olsoon”-ed them and started eating. I knew it was a meat stew of some sort, and could tell immediately that it was a fatty meat, but not too much more fatty than other soups I’ve had. A couple bites in, I looked up and noticed them looking at me. My host mother asked if I liked what I was eating, so of course I said yes. An aside: there’s not much gray area in Azerbaijani, or at least not in my personal language skills, so I’m usually stuck with “I like it, it’s good” or “I don’t like it, it’s bad.” They started grinning and my host father then asked me if I knew what I was eating. “It’s xash, isn’t it,” I said in English.

All they needed to know was that I’d said the word xash.