Kebabs of Old

Originally, the word “kebab” didn’t refer to shish kebab. It was fried or sauteed meat. By the 13th century, the word meant meatballs.

But in the Middle Ages, the Persians and Turks started using “kebab” as their term for chunks of meat grilled on small skewers (just to confuse things, though, they called pot roast tas kebab, or pot kebab). This is puzzling; maybe it was because the meat for those skewers was cut in relatively small pieces, even if not actually ground. Before that time, it had been usual in the Middle East, just as it was in Europe, to roast meat in larger cuts: whole chickens and whole racks or legs of lamb.

This was because medieval Middle Eastern cooks roasted meat in the oven--the tandoor oven, of course--rather than directly over coals. It makes sense to cook a large cut in an oven. Grilling takes too long and there’s too much chance of burning the surface of the meat. On top of that, chefs had a whole repertoire of sweet puddings to stick under the meat as it cooked to catch the juices--another reason to cook in an oven, rather than over coals.

Meat is still roasted in the tandoor oven in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. And from there, as we know, tandoori chicken eventually made its way to India.

The ground meat sense of “kebab” is why the Arabs call shish kebab either lahm mashwi (roast meat) or qudban (skewers), rather than shish kebab, and why a paste of meat pounded with onions and grain is known in the Arab world as kibbeh, another form of the word “kebab.” For that matter, it may be why the Yugoslav cevapcici are sausage-like cylinders of ground meat. Believe it or not, “cevapcici” is the word “kebab” after a long, bumpy ride.