Your piece says who you are

Your piece of meat
says who you are.

“At a Kyrgyz feast, your piece of meat says who you are.”From the film

At a southern Kyrgyz wedding, after the tea, the bread, the broth and the plov, the boiled meat comes in. It does not arrive as a pile for everyone to share. It arrives as bones. Long bones with the meat still on them, called ustukan, and every one of them is meant for someone.

An ethnographer who sat through southern Kyrgyz weddings in 2012 calls the handing out of ustukan the climax of the whole meal: twelve long sheep bones with meat, “matched to the social status of the one who receives them”. The custom, she writes, is unshaken, “the most important rule of etiquette and a marker of social status”.1

So the piece in front of you is a sentence about you. It says how old you are, whether you are a guest or family, a man or a woman, and how much the house wants to honour you. The film is sewn the way this table works: one patch at a time, each one stitched to its place.

Bones go out by rank.
Each valley has its own order.

It starts before anyone sits down. The platters, tabak, are laid by the number and rank of the guests, one for every four or five people: a senior platter for the elders of the in-laws and the guests of honour, a middle one, a junior one. The host tastes the meat first.2 Then the bones are given out.

Which bone goes to whom is where it gets interesting, because there is no single Kyrgyz table of it. Writers agree on the outline and disagree on the details. In Chon-Alay the place of honour goes to the sacrum and the middle of the fat tail, and only then the head.1 Among the Ichkilik Kyrgyz of the south-west and the Kyrgyz of the Pamirs the main gift to a guest is the ucha, the sacrum with the tail.5 The sheep’s head is honoured everywhere, but in Chuy, Talas and Osh it goes to the aksakal, the white-bearded elder, while in Issyk-Kul and Naryn it goes to the young.3

Tap the pieces on the platter below. It is one common order, the one most writers share, not a law for the whole country.

The elder gets the hip bone.
The young get the friend’s bone.

“An elder or an honoured guest gets the hip bone.”From the film

The fattest, softest pieces go to the top of the table. The jambash, the hip bone, is the one most sources name first: the aksakal takes it, or a guest the house wants to honour.3 One writer calls it simply the most honoured of all.2 The next two long bones, the joto jilik and the kashka jilik, go to the next bearded men down the line, and the ribs count as an honour too.3

The eldest woman, the baybiche, gets the kuymulchak, the rump with the fat of the tail. It is never served to a man; if the bride’s or groom’s mother is at the table, it goes to her.4

The young get what is left of the honour list: the back, the neck, the shoulder blade and the shoulder bone.2 That last one, the kar jilik, has a second name, joldosh jilik: the companion’s bone, the friend’s bone.3 It is not a lesser piece. A popular saying treats it as sacred, a bone you do not break: keep one with you, it says, and it is as if forty young men stood beside you.4

Then the youngest
chops the meat for all.

“Then the youngest strips the bones and chops the meat for all.”From the film

Here the story turns. At each platter the youngest person sitting there takes a knife, cuts the meat off the bones and hands the bones round, by age, by honour, by what each person is due. Then the youngest chops the meat fine, for everyone.2

Think about what that means. The one with the humblest seat and the plainest piece is the one who feeds the whole table. The ranks of a moment ago, hip bone and rump and friend’s bone, go into one heap of small pieces in the middle of one platter.

Someone else has a job too. Before the meat, the host’s youngest child or a relative goes round with warm water and pours it over the guests’ hands; when the platters are taken away and the blessing, the bata, has been said, the water comes round again.2 The bones are not thrown out: their small ankle bones are cleaned and kept as pieces for children’s games.2

Five fingers,
one platter.

“On noodles with onion sauce, it’s beshbarmak, ‘five fingers’, traditionally eaten by hand from one platter.”From the film

The chopped meat goes onto thin sheets of boiled dough, and over it all comes chyk: onion sliced thin and stewed in the fatty broth.9 The clear broth itself, shorpo, is served in bowls alongside.7 Horse meat is the most prized; mutton, being cheaper, is what most tables use.1

The name is the plainest thing about it. Besh is five, barmak is finger: the dish is called five fingers because it is eaten by hand.67 The meaning is not in doubt. How old the name is, is: the Russian word was borrowed in the nineteenth century, and one scholar argues that the Turkic name itself is late, a word interpreters gave the dish.10 At home in Kyrgyzstan it may simply be called et, meat, or tuuralgan et, chopped meat.1

The film says traditionally on purpose. We found no good source on how often people still eat it by hand today, in a city flat or a café. But the platter is still one, and still in the middle.

That is the whole trick of the custom. First the table is sorted: hip bone, rump, friend’s bone, each piece a name. Then the youngest picks up the knife, and the sorting is folded back into one dish that every hand reaches into.