Karta (Қарта)

The karta completes the Kazakh charcuterie triptych with the kazy and the shuzhuk. Its logic of making differs radically from the other two: the horse’s large intestine is turned inside out on itself, exposing the layer of fat that naturally lines its inner wall. The intestine is at once container and contents, which the word karta renders in Kazakh, since it designates the large intestine without distinguishing the organ from the preparation drawn from it.

The technique of inversion has no documented equivalent in European or Middle Eastern charcuterie. The horse fat exposed by the inversion, richer in unsaturated fatty acids than beef suet, remains semi-liquid at room temperature. The seasoned strips of flank fat, with salt, pepper and cumin, are introduced inside the inverted intestine, whose two ends are knotted. Prolonged poaching partly melts this fat, producing a dense, gelatinous texture.

The etymology is Turco-Mongol, common to several languages of the family. Its presence in all the Turkic languages of Central Asia testifies to the antiquity of this preparation within nomadic culture, well before the rise of the modern nation-states. The first written descriptions appear in Russian ethnographic sources of the nineteenth century, during the imperial administration’s surveys of eating practices.

Like the kazy and the shuzhuk, the karta is prepared at the soğım (see the kazy entry). Its place at festive meals is that of a piece of prestige: served in thick, warm rounds, with the beshbarmak (boiled karta over flat noodles with an onion sauce) and kurt (small balls of fermented milk, salted and dried), it is reserved for the guests of honour.