For this zone, a clarification is called for. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan are the heirs of the nomadic civilisations of the steppes. Azerbaijan is Turkic-speaking but Caucasian in its geography. Armenia and Georgia are Christian, speak distinct languages, and have histories that were, in part, shaped in opposition to the Turkic empires that surrounded them. Turkey does not appear in this zone: this book attaches it to the Mediterranean for reasons of charcuterie coherence, as the section ‘The division into eleven zones’ explains. The Turkic world of the title refers to the wider Eurasian space in which Turkic-speaking peoples developed common culinary traditions before the formation of modern nation-states.

The charcuterie of the Central Asian steppes rests on two raw materials found nowhere else in this book. Horse meat is the first: the Kazakh kazy and the Kyrgyz chuchuk are made of a strip of ribs with its layer of fat, rolled on itself and stuffed into the horse’s intestine; the Kazakh shuzhuk, more common in everyday life, is made of the same rib meat, boned and cut into small pieces, with added fat, then dried. In the civilisation of the steppes, the horse is not first of all a food resource: it is an animal of work and prestige, and its consumption at the great festivals, at Nauryz (the new year and spring festival), at weddings and at funerals is a communal act whose significance has been documented for several centuries. The tail fat of the fat-tailed sheep of Central Asia is the second distinctive material: white and firm, drawn from breeds adapted to arid conditions such as the Karakul or the Hissar, it forms part of the composition of the Uzbek hasip and several neighbouring preparations.

The zira (Bunium persicum), the wild cumin of the Tian Shan and the Pamir, is the spice that links the preparations in this section to one another and to adjacent zones. Smaller, more intense and slightly camphorated than the common cumin of the Mediterranean kitchens, it is present in nearly all the Central Asian charcuteries described here. Its local omnipresence owes first to its spontaneous growth in the region; the trade routes and the Turkic migrations then carried its use well beyond its natural range, as far as the Armenian soudjouk of the Caucasus.

The Caucasus forms a sub-ensemble at the frontier of several influences, whose charcuteries bear the mingled imprints. The Armenian soudjouk shares with the Turkish sucuk of the Mediterranean zone a common origin in the traditions of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, but the use of sumac and fenugreek marks a properly Armenian evolution over the centuries. The Georgian kupati, a fresh sausage of pork and offal lifted by Caucasian spices (coriander, fenugreek, sweet pepper, walnuts), belongs to a Georgian cuisine shaped by successive Persian, Ottoman and Russian influences without losing its own coherence.

The Uzbek hasip establishes a technical link with the Mediterranean section. Made of a casing filled with chopped meat, rice, and lamb’s tail fat, then cooked in a flavoured broth, it shares with the Egyptian mombar and the Tunisian osban the same logic: using the casing as the container for a mixture of grain and meat. The chapter ‘The origins’ develops this parallelism as an example of convergent solutions between distant cultures; nothing in the available sources allows these preparations to be traced to a common origin.

The Soviet period marked this zone with an episode of forced standardisation whose effects remain visible. The local charcuterie traditions were partly marginalised in favour of centralised industrial production, such as the doktorskaya kolbasa, which was treated earlier. Since independence in 1991, a movement to rehabilitate the kazy, the shuzhuk, and the hasip has taken hold in the countries concerned, driven by renewed interest in national identities. These products are today present in the grocers of the Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Uzbek diasporas in Germany, Russia and Turkey.