Kazan — summer 2012

Every patriotic Murrikan owns a grill on which testosterone-gifted men grill hamburgers, steaks and brats. The Russian/Tatar equivalent of the that event is making shashlyk, i.e. shishkebabs. Every family owns a set of shampury (skewers) on which they string chunks of pork meat alternating with pork fat. They also will use mutton and beef, but my hosts all agree that pork is best. The chunks of pork fat help keep the rest of the meat chunks moist, and they themselves are crunchy and delectable in a way that would make George H. W. Bush (the older one) proud. For those of you who don't know the reference, he was fond of fried pork rinds, and if he liked that stuff, he would go crazy for this.

Here's a picture of the shahslyki under construction. Previously they had been marinating in a mix of garlic and spices.

In the movie “Moscow does not believe in tears” the male protagonist says, “Only men should make shashlyk.” Today the daughter Dasha made and grilled them, and frankly she did a stellar job. Sorry, guys, but I'm gonna have to take the feminist side on this one.

The skewers are eventually moved to a mangal, a setup that holds coals and is of a particular width. The skewers are of a standard size, so pretty well all the mangaly are of a standard size as well. And if you go out into the woods, sometimes you will find a rectangle of bricks in the middle of the woods that have previously served as a mangal. You can rely on the fact that your skewers will fit perfectly across those bricks that were rather thoughtlessly left by previous shishkabobbers. Here are ours on the grill.

In the meantime Danila et alies are setting up a table, upon which everything will be placed. Danila has coached his family admirably in advance of my arrival, telling them things such as the fact that I like salads made entirely of leaves. This caused his mother a bit of perplexity. Russian salads tend to be mixes of vegetable matter and meat bound together by sour cream or mayonnaise. She did a great job on this salad, even thought it almost nothing but greens (gasp) and some oil and vinegar.

And here apparently I made another cultural error. I started to use a fork to pull the meat off my skewer, and they immediately told me no-no-no, you must eat it straight off the skewer. Of course, I had to make a video of that.

Y'know, that video makes me think a bit of Andrew Zimmern. I foresee my next career on The Food Channel.