Talaa Tamagy

Talaa tamagy (Iradi, "steppe food") is the regional cuisine of the northern steppe of Irad (the Betpak-Dala, the Moiynkum and the Chu–Sarysu lowland) and of the Karatau. It is the cooking of the six Northern Steppe clans and the three clans of the Karatau, one of the regional cuisines of Irad: a cuisine of long migrations and wells, cooked in one cauldron, with few vegetables and little bread, and one in which the Iradi taboo on horsemeat is often tested by neighbours' customs.^[1]

Area and history

The steppe clans keep cattle, sheep and camels and move up to 300 kilometres between the summer pastures of the Talas Alatau foothills and the winter pastures of the Moiynkum. Their contact with the Kazakh herders of the same steppes gave their cooking its Kazakh shape. Since 2007 the region has been tribal, supply depends on trade across the Qara-Chik Demarcation Line, and in hard winters on barter: the United Nations Mission in Irad has recorded a fat-tailed sheep exchanged for about 150 litres of diesel.^[1]

Ingredients

Mutton and beef from the herds, camel meat and camel's milk on the Betpak-Dala, flour and tea bought or bartered from the valleys, and salt from the steppe lakes. Vegetables are few: onions, potatoes and, in season, wild onion and steppe rhubarb.^[1]

Dishes

Et: meat boiled in large pieces and served on broad, thin squares of noodle dough in the Kazakh manner, with onions cooked in the broth, followed by the broth itself (sorpa) in bowls.
Töö kazy: sausage of camel meat and fat, made where Kazakh neighbours use horsemeat; beef and mutton kazy are also made.
Kuyrdak: liver, lungs, heart and meat fried with onions, cooked on the day of a slaughter.
Baursak: fried dough made in the Kazakh shape, puffed squares or balls, heaped on the cloth.
Kurt: hard dried curd, salted and sun-dried, carried on the long migrations.^[1]

The Karatau

The three Karatau clans, who call themselves the Eski El ("the old people") and do not consider themselves Iradis, keep a stranger table, which other Iradis find uncanny. On the spring feast of the White Rider they cook a white lamb at a spring with hot stones inside its own skin, and everyone present must eat before sunrise (tash kozu); other Iradis regard it as a sacrifice. In April they make a broth of steppe tortoises for the sick and new mothers (tash baka shorpo), which conservationists have asked them to stop.^[1]

Drinks

Strong black tea is drunk with milk and salt, many bowls at a sitting. Camel's milk is drunk fermented as shubat, sharper and thicker than kymyz, which is also made in summer from the clans' mares.^[1]

Horsemeat on the steppe

The steppe clans observe the Iradi taboo on horsemeat, but their Kazakh neighbours do not, and small amounts of horsemeat are believed to be sold informally in some Kazakh communities near the frontier. Steppe Iradis invited to a Kazakh table ask what the kazy is made of, and many keep a camel or mutton sausage for such guests.^[1]^[2]

References

^ United Nations Mission in Irad (2022). Food Security Assessment: Northern Steppe and Karatau Zones. Kara-Oi.
^ Central Asian Geopolitical Review (2021). 'Eating the Other: Horsemeat, Religion and Boundary-Making in Irad.' Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 140–163.