White Meat

One of the greatest honors while visiting another country is to be invited to eat a meal in the home of a local family. Such has been my pleasure in many places during my 46 years of international travel.

While leading business conferences in Kyrgyzstan before the fall of Communism, an ethnic Kyrgyz family invited me and my three colleagues to eat in their home. My friend was the Minister of Culture, and I had hosted him and three of his colleagues in the USA, so he wanted to return the favor to me.

Although he was one of the leaders of the country, his family lived in a small apartment in an eleven-story building. We arrived to find that they had pushed the sofa and stuffed chairs out of the way and set up a dining table and chairs in the middle of the living room. We were immediately seated at the dining table.

One of my colleagues, Mike Jones, was a college basketball coach at that time. He was big, very friendly and made a lot of jokes that were hard to interpret, so he was the favorite of our delegation. His eyes lit up as our hostess brought a large platter of broiled chicken to the table.  While our Kyrgyz guests were visiting us in the states, we had served them a lot of chicken, so I suppose my friend had told his wife that she should prepare chicken for us. I was expecting a traditional Kyrgyz meal, so I was not as excited as Mike to see the platter of chicken.

Like most Kyrgyz at that time, our host and his family were nominal Muslims. When he and his colleagues had visited us in the USA, we often prayed before our meal, so he asked me to pray.

As Mike stabbed a big chicken breast and put it on his plate, our hostess was coming from the kitchen with a platter of vegetables. She set the platter down on the table and immediately went to Mike’s plate and forked the chicken breast and placed it back on the serving plate. Mike’s mouth dropped open and he wondered what he had done wrong. The hostess then forked a chicken leg and placed it on Mike’s plate.

Our host, slightly embarrassed, said that honored guests were always served the dark meat because it is the most desirable and tastiest chicken meat. The white meat was consumed by the host and his family. Mike was so discouraged because that was the first chicken that we had been served. We had eaten a lot of mutton and some beef and some horse meat. The Kyrgyz eat so much horse meat that when their athletic teams compete in other countries, they must get special permission to bring horse meat with them to maintain their strength received from eating horse meat.  

Only once was I ever served a traditional Kyrgyz dish called “beshbarmak.” This is one of Kyrgyzstan’s national dishes, and it is served and eaten in a very specific way. “Beshbarmak” literally means “five fingers,” referring to the fact that it is consumed using bare hands with no usage of spoons or chopsticks. Historically, the Kyrgyz people were nomadic people and did not carry such implements with them. The dish itself typically consists of homemade, bread-like noodles, boiled sheep meat and fat, and salt, and is served on large platters which are shared by 2-4 people.

The Kyrgyz are a very hospitable people who love to make their guests comfortable and happy. Every trip I made to Central Asia during a six-year period, I gained weight because once you ate the food on your plate, the host or hostess would refill your plate. I learned the hard way that when you have had enough to eat that you always leave some food on your plate so that they would not refill it.

Now that I think about it, that was the same principle my grandmother used while I was growing up and eating at her table: never clean your plate unless you want more food.

As I have traveled around the world, it’s always been amazing to me how very different cultures can be, but yet at the same time how similar are many of the customs, practices and habits.