The Story of KashkAuthor(s): Kareh Moraba

Source: Gastronomica , Vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter 2016), pp. 97-100

Published by: University of California Press

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V I S U A L E S S A Y | Kareh Moraba

The Story of Kashk

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97
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FI GU RE 1: Iran’s two most widely known kashk dishes are kashk bademjan and ash reshteh: eggplant dip and a thick noodle soup with beans and herbs.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KAREH MORABA © 2014

T O T H E U N T R A I N E D E Y E , kashk resembles a creamy piece of Kerman, one of Iran’s desert provinces, called boz ghormeh.
clay or chalk. Simply put, it is drained and dried sour yogurt, This is lamb shoulder braised in a stone pot and deboned, then
used in Iranian staple foods like kashk bademjan—an eggplant thoroughly mixed on the fire with liquid kashk, crushed walnuts,
dip with liquid saffron, sautéed onions, garlic, and (often) and golden sautéed onions. Boz ghormeh is eaten like a spread,
walnuts. My favorite kashk dish is a recipe originating from with dried flatbread, also unique to the desert provinces. The

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 hot, burning sun of these regions dries the bread, kashk, and a
myriad of other foods that make Iranian cuisine both laborious
and colorful.
Kashk has been a significant ingredient in the diet of
the Iranian peoples for thousands of years. In Ferdowsi’s Book
of Kings, the epic stories of ancient Persian battles, princes,
and beasts written in the tenth century, kashk is served as a
food to the troops. Even earlier, during the rule of the Parthian
empire (200 BCE to 200 CE) in Iran, kashk is cited as a prom-
inent food source (Tafazzoli 1995). In later texts, kashk and
thick, creamy yogurt are often interchangeable in recipes
(Afshar 2009). This similarity has inspired a saying in Persian
folklore: “putting kashk and yogurt together,” meaning for two
sides to look so similar that a shared enemy would not be able
to distinguish between them (Amini 2012).
Such a fundamental ingredient in Iranian cuisine, kashk
has found its way from ancient times to the industrialized
food system. It gives dishes a rich, velvety texture and adds
just the right dash of tang to our thick herbal soups, dips, and
meats. In the American grocery store, the closest item to
kashk is sour cream—though the latter does not have nearly
the sourness or thickness. But in Iran, go to any grocery store
across the country and you will find kashk in the refrigerated
section, in a glass jar. Bought ready-made, it has a composi-
tion like thick mayonnaise. Most urbanites prefer the grocery
store variety, because it has been deemed “pasteurized” and
thus safe, and of course, quick. Because food has to be fast
these days or risk being completely forgotten.
But there are perks to living in a country that has not
been fully taken over by an industrialized food system—yet.
Across Iran, kashk is still produced the old way by nomads
and in villages. It is a lengthy process that begins by sub-
FI GUR E 2: A meal of Khashkal Joosh: kashk soup. Walnuts, saffron,
tracting the butter from yogurt inside a waterskin—a con-
sautéed onions, and a selection of dried herbs are added to the
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tainer made of sheep bladder we call mashk. Somewhere liquid kashk on the stove and mixed until cooked. Ms. Noroozi in
in the universe a sonnet is waiting to be written rhyming Kharanagh Village baked the bread as she was preparing the soup.
kashk and mashk. PHOTOGRAPH BY KAREH MORABA © 2014

The liquid that remains once the butter is removed from

98 yogurt is doogh, a creamy substance consumed chilled as a
beverage, sprinkled with peppermint and dried rose petals, is made widely in the desert and southwestern regions of Iran
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best enjoyed with a variety of Iranian meat dishes. I like my
doogh with lamb kabob, grilled tomatoes, fresh bread, and
onions. Doogh from a mashk is a stronger sedative than horse
tranquilizers: it will have you napping under shade in no
time. To us in the hot, arid climates of Iran, the post-lunch
siesta is a very strict part of the daily regimen.
Once this doogh is dried, by extracting the water from it us-
ing fabric as a sieve, a thick paste remains. The paste is further
cut into shapes—balls or noodles or long strips and dried in
the sun, the dried pieces becoming kashk. This dairy product
that have spacious grazing grounds and scalding late-spring
heat. Fresh grass in the spring means an abundance of milk
every day (and ewe yogurt). Throughout Iran and Central
Asia, people for centuries have utilized kashk making to pre-
serve the blessing that is abundant milk in the spring.
Kerman is the province known for producing some of the
best kashk in the country. “The most beautiful kashk comes
from Kerman,” writes Nader Mirza Qajar, a nobleman of the
Qajar era in the nineteenth century (Mojahed 2009). It is
also dried with cumin and made into thin noodles, then

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FI GU RE 3: In the province of Kerman, local dairy stores sometimes carry village kashk, sold in the bulk section.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KAREH MORABA © 2015

mixed with salted cannabis seeds, almond kernels, and pista-
chios roasted with saffron. Kids up to my mother’s generation
never carried around chips or candy in their pockets; kashk is
what they snacked on during the day.
Bring a pot of kashk home from a village, and it still has a
strong pastoral odor. I like to open my glass jar of kashk, stick
my nose through the lid, and take a deep breath. It takes me
urban life of juggling parenting, spousing, and cooking,
spending hours on a few kashk balls had no place.
Village kashk does “smell” but it is the kind of smell that
food should have. Animals don’t bathe or live odor-free but
they also don’t discharge niflumic acid, 17-beta-estradiol, and
triclosan. Nature does not produce such incoherent words.
And here is where industrial kashk comes in: you get an odor-

back to roaming the southern countryside as a child, playing
with the herd or sitting by the nomadic women as they
whisked the mashk from side to side. Or, digging into a fresh
pot of yogurt with homemade bread right on the pastures—
almost having me wish I could swim in the pot. As a child,
one would fit in there quite nicely. My grandmother, on the
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less paste akin to a piece of dried wood sprinkled with some
sourness; a slew of names in the ingredients section that you
can’t even pronounce.
Village kashk, however, has its downside: the entire pro-
cess of draining and drying has to be undone, bringing it 99
back full circle. The kashk balls must be soaked overnight,
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other hand, proclaims village kashk smells of “sheep ma-
nure.” She grew up with kashk her father brought from the
village, but now swears by the grocery store variety—most
women do these days.
Women of my grandmother’s generation became the first
to embrace industrialized food en masse, and she likes her
kashk ready from a grocery store in a jar. Married at 16, she
went back to school to obtain her high school and university
certificates after the birth of her first two children. She was an
elementary school teacher for thirty years, and in her hectic
then slowly whisked into liquid by rubbing. In the old days,
when all was done by hand, there were special pottery dishes
with edges in the bowl. Women would rub the kashk in the
bowl, adding water slowly until a paste was formed. We have
a saying in Persian: Boro kashket ro besab, Go rub your kashk,
which roughly translates to “take a hike,” “busy yourself with
a task that will never end.”
Nowadays, you put the kashk in a food processor and
slowly whip it back into shape. But each time I prepare it for
eggplant, boz ghormeh, or herbal soup, I wonder how much

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F I GU R E 4: After kashk balls are soaked overnight, they are cut into
pieces and put into the food processor. By slowly adding lukewarm
water and mixing, the paste is formed.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KAREH MORABA © 2015
longer and harder it would have been to have to rub kashk
into liquid. Only after watching women go about their day-
to-day chores in the village do you realize how much more
physical life used to be on a farm or pasture.
Despite having grown up in the industrial food age, I have
made a pledge: to eat kashk raw, to only use the real thing.
Every spring I try to travel to the village—which is now being
replaced more and more by new apartment blocks—looking
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for kashk. I then lug back a suitcase filled with dried kashk
balls halfway around the world. Only close to when my
plane is landing on American soil do I start to tremble with
fear: Customs can confiscate all my efforts in a heartbeat,
dash my dreams of boz ghormeh and flatbread.
With pleading eyes I walk to their office with my suitcase.
The man in blue gloves suspiciously looks at my container of
kashk, as if inspecting a specimen under a microscope. I want
to remind the good gentlemen that the soft drink he has be-
side him is leagues more fatal, but decide otherwise. By tak-
ing away that package, customs will banish me to the
refrigerated section of the Iranian grocery store. I remember
the journey to the green hills of the village. The officer
frowns and further investigates the kashk.
Thus far, I have been allowed inside the country with my
kashk intact. And that has made all the difference. Since ancient
times the women of my land have been rubbing kashk—pun
intended. It is an arduous process, but one that connects us
through flavors, scents, and textures to sheep grazing on grass in
the sunlight.
REFERENCES
Afshar, I., ed. 2009. Aspaziyeh doreyeh Safavi [Cooking in the
Safavid Era]. Tehran: Soroush.
Amini, A. Q. 2012. Farhang-e Avam [Popular Expressions]. Tehran:
Ferdows.
Ferdowsi, A. 1998 [944]. Shahnameh [The Book of Kings].
Mashhad, Iran: Astan Qods Razavi.
Mojahed, Ahmad, ed. 2009. Khorakhayeh Irani, Nader Mirza Qajar
[Iranian Dishes by Nader Mirza Qajar]. Tehran: University of
Tehran Press.
Tafazzoli, Ahmad. 1995. DRAXT ĪĀSŪRĪG. Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 7,
fasc. 5, pp. 547–49. www.iranicaonline.org/articles/draxti-asurig.