My One Time with Chuchuk

You will not be able to order “horse meat sausage” in a Kyrgyz restaurant. But if your trusted Kyrgyz friends ask for “chuchuk” at a place they frequent and know for its traditional dishes, you might get lucky.

Chuchuk is traditionally served at a Kyrgyz feast called a “toy.” It’s a delicacy rather than an everyday food, requiring time, knowledge of ancient nomadic preparation methods and spice combination, as well as patience to make it. At a toy, it is usually served as a prized starter along with flatbread (“nan”), dried fruits, cheese, and varieties of sliced cold meats.

I grew up in Soviet Kyrgyzstan and had never eaten it.

That is, not until I was fifty-two years old, back in my home country for a summer break, and a dear Kyrgyz friend unknowingly served me what turned out to be the shock of my adult life.

Yes, chuchuk is made of horse meat and fat. It is not a sausage in the true sense, where the meat and fat are ground and mixed. When chuchuk is sliced, you will see chunks of meat and fat in each slice. In preparation, the meat and fat are cut into long strips, seasoned, and stuffed into cleaned intestines, to be either boiled, dried, or smoked. Chuchuk looks redder and leaner than other types of meat, just like in the cover picture for this story.

So, when in 2022 I was finally able to go back to Kyrgyzstan again after the pandemic, I was invited for dinner to my dear friend’s house. I’ve known her since 1999. We wrote a book and conducted a lot of research projects together. She is a great sociologist, feminist, and overall, a great human. One of the things she excels at is hospitality. Whenever you come to her house, you will get a spread of food even before the main dishes are served, and the entire meal will be an hours-long enjoyable experience with a great intellectual conversation.

I came to her home to catch up after I hadn’t seen her for five years, and started mindlessly snacking on everything that was set out on the table: a selection of excellent cheeses, fresh fruits, traditional bread with onions called kattama you eat dipping into kaymak (very thick cream), and sliced meat. I did notice that the sliced sausage on the cold-meat platter looked unusually red and lean, but didn’t register it fully.

“What’s this sausage?” I asked my friend, munching on a slice, and avoiding the fat part as I don’t like the fat in anything. I actually liked the sausage's smoky taste, and thought that it was different from anything I’d tasted before: a little sweeter, richer, and more velvety in texture. I just thought it was some specially spiced and tenderized beef or goat meat.

Her eyes rounded in shock.

“You don’t know?” she asked, horrified.

“Nope,” I said without a second thought, still munching and enjoying it.

“It’s chuchuk,” she said, watching my reaction closely.

I had an involuntary gag reflex. Out of politeness, I swallowed and forcefully pushed it down, putting the remaining piece of fat on my napkin.

“I am so, so, sorry,” my friend, always sensitive to cultural differences and exposure to rituals, said. “I thought since you grew up here you knew.”

“I knew of it, but never tried it,” I said, still in shock.

“But I thought since you’d spent your summers in your grandparents’ village with a lot of Kyrgyz neighbors, as you’d told me, you’d have had it at least once. Didn’t you ever attend toys?”

“As kids, we were not really invited. We were more interested in just roaming the streets instead of sharing long feasts with adults. Our grandparents would bring lots of toy leftover food for us, but I don’t remember ever being offered chuchuk.”

“I am so, so, sorry again, my dear friend,” she apologized again profusely. “I should have asked, but I just assumed. Look at me, Sociology 101: never expose people to new cultural rituals without explicit consent.”

“C’mon, stop it,” I finally laughed, recovering from the shock. “It’s not a big deal. You know me and food, I’d try anything at least once. Let’s count this as my one time for chuchuk.”

“Did you at least like it?” she asked.

“It was surprisingly tasty,” I admitted. “But I wouldn’t eat it again, I’m sorry, just the whole idea of eating the horse, a human’s most loyal friend after the dog, is something I can’t…”

“Well, as nomads, we have a different relationship with horses. They are not only companions, but also a source of milk – kumys, as you know, and yes, meat. That’s how my people survived for millennia.”

“Sheep is not enough?” I asked, and we went into a lengthy near-academic discussion about food sources for nomadic people and the relationship between people and animals.

If you ever visit Kyrgyzstan, I would strongly caution you against asking for chuchuk at a Kyrgyz restaurant without a local friend. But you’d be able to find it in specialty stores and food markets. As for me, I’ve had my one time with chuchuk, and once was enough.

P.S. If you want a deeper dive into the significance of horse meat for the Kyrgyz culture, I strongly encourage you to research “Chuchuk-gate,” a 2016 New Year’s incident involving Michael McFeat, a Scottish expat in Kyrgyzstan, mistakenly referring to chuchuk as “horses’ penis” and involuntarily causing an international scandal of the “-gate” proportion.