Tyvan Soup

A picture of a typical Tyvan Soup (it's cold so the fat has congealed, but you can actually see the different ingredients--meat, macaroni, potates--better this way).

The staple of my diet here in Tyva is Tyvan Soup, a simple dish prepared from mutton, macaroni, and potatoes. To make Tyvan soup you put some pieces of mutton in a pot and boil the be-jeebers out of them. The goal is to get the essence of the meat to transfer itself to the water--preserving the subtle meatiness in the flavor of the soup. Meat in Tyva is a truly natural product and is produced by nomadic herdsmen all over the republic. However, a lot of the meat people here eat actually comes from Mongolia because the prices are significantly cheaper across the border. Most of the border towns in Tyva engage in a fair amount of illegal meat smuggling.

Then, once the meaty broth is ready, you just add macaroni and potatoes and cook until they’re really soft. The resulting soup is undeniably savory and filling. It also is the perfect cure to cold weather.

The official national dish of Tyva is similar to this soup in theory, just prepared on a larger scale. The dish is essentially a boiled sheep. There is a process for slaughtering that is practiced widely throughout Central Asia that allows the herders to kill a sheep without spilling a drop of blood. It involves making a small cut in the chest of the sheep and reaching a hand inside the sheep to pinch some piece (unfortunately I can’t remember which part exactly) of the heart. Then the sheep dies relatively peacefully, with minimal gore and maximal dignity. Then people set to, chopping the body into bits. People here use all the parts. They make blood sausage from the small intestines and other delicacies from the large intestines and stomach lining. The ankle bones become kazhik’s--dice for playing games on the long winter evenings. Usually the eating of the meat commences with family gathered around a table piled high in boiled sheep parts. Everybody gorges on meat, eating with their hands. Even the big bones are cut open, to get at the marrow inside which is considered especially tasty. Even when smaller quantities of meat are cooked, there is usually a lot of chewing on the bones, trying to get all the edible parts off. There is a Tyvan myth that grandmothers like to tell, that when you die you go to a purgatory-like place and meet with all the bones you didn’t clean off completely and have to chew them all again.

One refrain that people tell me here in Tyva is: «Без мяса, мы не могли бы жить», or “We couldn‘t live without meant.” Meat gives the Tyvans the strength to survive the winter. If a family runs out of meat, they say that they have run out of food. They could have kilos of cabbages, macaroni and potatoes left, but they tell me they will feel like they have nothing and be very unhappy.

Meat is also the gift that relatives from the country bring when they come to stay in the city--which they have to do fairly frequently for doctor’s visits, bureaucratic paperwork, or educational reasons. Large duffle bags full of frozen sheep parts that appear to have been chopped up with an axe are a common sight here. So are big hunks of meat sitting on someone’s kitchen counter slowly thawing, sometimes with a pool of blood underneath. People seem to cut little pieces off at a time to cook with. And in general the sanitary handling of meat seems a little less rigorous here than in the states, though in the place where I live we use bleach for some cleaning tasks, which makes me happy.

I finally would say that Tyvans eat meat with much greater frequency than we do in the US, although the quantities are usually pretty small (with the notable exception of the national dish). We have small pieces of meat spread throughout whatever we’re eating, for flavor and such, but I could never imagine people here eating a 14 oz steak, for example. Meat is a comparatively expensive food, and so it is not eaten in large quantities. Which fits more with the idea of trophic levels that I studied in high school Biology class… though in general vegetarianism is looked upon with great suspicion, as some form of Western deviancy.

All the best until next time,
Riley