It’s the end of summer in the Northern hemisphere, it’s still winter in the Southern hemisphere and it’s monsoon season in the tropics. Whatever the temperature outside, and whether it’s sunny, snowy or rainy, it’s hard to say no to chicken skewers. The meat can be flavored lightly and paired with a salad for a warm day meal, or it can be seasoned boldly and eaten with carbs for a cold night meal. If the outdoors won’t allow char-grilling, there’s always the oven or stovetop grill.
What’s the charm of grilled skewered chicken anyway? I’d say it’s collective nostalgia. Despite leaps in technology that make modern conveniences possible, a part of us yearn for the simplest and, perhaps, the most primitive way of cooking meat for food.
Grilled skewered meat is older than kebab
Grilled skewered meat is found all over the world. The marinade and seasonings differ, and so does the name of the dish — sate / satay in Southeast Asia, yakitori and yakiton in Japan, barbecue in the Philippines, souvlaki in Greece, arrosticini in the Italian regions of Molise and Abruzzo, shashlik in Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains, sosatie in South Africa… In the Middle East and the Mediterranean, it is kebab — shish kebab to be more accurate.
Which among these grilled skewered meat dishes came first? Kebab is the ancestor. But the birth of kebab is not synonymous with the invention of skewering cut up pieces of meat and placing the skewers over fire or glowing ember. That happened much, much earlier.
While it’s difficult to determine exactly when humans started to cut meat into small pieces and skewered the pieces for cooking, it is logical to assume that it happened after humans learned to control fire and had developed a cutting tool that can slash an animal into portions and the portions cut into pieces small enough to thread with a skewer.
Birth of kebab
By the time the dish was known as kebab, humans had learned to season and marinate the meat before skewering and grilling. In other words, kebab is, essentially, a refinement of a primitive food and cooking method.
Where was this refined version of grilled skewered meat first cooked? The Middle East. Some historians pinpoint Turkey but that might just be because the origin of the word kebab has Turkish roots. The thing is, a similar word had been in the Persian language since the 12th century from which the Turkish kebab was most likely derived. In Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, historian Gil Marks cites a famous but “usually mistranslated” quatrain in Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (c. 1100 CE) that mentions a loaf of bread, a flask of wine and kabob.
Spread of kebab
We’ll probably never know for sure where kebab was born. Perhaps, it was in Turkey. Maybe, in Persia (modern-day Iran). What’s more interesting is how kebab wound up as far as Asia where it became yakitori and sate / satay. From what I’ve read, the spread of kebab can be attributed to three things:
- Trade (especially via the ancient Silk Road);
- Spread of Islam; and
- Colonial expansion of the Ottoman Empire.
Much ado about skewered meat? Perhaps, for some. But for the curious, isn’t its historical and geographic journey simply amazing?
