Qurut

Qurut is dried curd.^[1] Mahmud al-Kashgari, writing in the 1070s, glosses qurut with the Arabic aqiṭ, “dried curds”.^[1] Turning milk into dairy foods lets the herders of the eastern steppe store it and carry it with them.^[2] In Mongolia dried curd made from yak and cow milk is called aaruul today.^[3] No text of the Göktürk period names the food.

The word in Kashgari’s dictionary

Mahmud al-Kashgari wrote his dictionary of the Turkic languages in Arabic between 1073 and 1077.^[4] The entry qurut has a single gloss, “dried curds”.^[1] A second entry shows how it was made: ol qōydan qurut suγdi, “he made dried curds from the sheep’s milk”.^[5] A man who has dried curds is qurutluγ kiši.^[6] Kashgari compares the phrase with an Arabic expression for a man who has dates and milk.^[6] In both languages, then, the man is described by the stores he keeps.

Curds and cheese

The dictionary records a whole range of words for soured and curdled milk. Süzmä is “curds”.^[7] Igdük is a food made from milk and curdled milk, similar to cheese.^[8] Uḏitma is “moist cheese”. The verb uḏit- is used both for curdling yoghurt, yoγrut, and for curdling cheese.^[9] Iprük is a mixture of curdled and fresh milk, drunk as a laxative by someone constipated from drinking sour or churned milk.^[10] Kashgari’s word for churned milk is ayran.^[11] Curdled milk also went into cooking: mixed with the juice of a laserwort, it was added to the gravy of tutmaç, a noodle dish.^[7]

The milking itself has its words too. Är qōy saγdi is “the man milked the sheep”.^[5] Sarnič is “a leather milking pail”.^[12]

Qurut as a store for winter and the road

One Turkish history of culture counts dried curd and çökelek among the foods kept for winter and for travel.^[13] It adds that every kind of dried curd would have let an army fight for months without hardship, although herds of animals for slaughter also followed the old armies.^[13] The same work holds that qurut in the older period meant any milk that was dried so that it would keep, not only dried skimmed yogurt.^[14] It regards the word as Turkic, derived from the verb kurumak, “to dry”.^[14] In its view the Mongols took the word from the Turks. Envoys of the thirteenth century wrote it grut, and the Mongolian additions to the medieval glossaries write gurut. The Secret History of the Mongols does not have it.^[14] In the nineteenth century Vámbéry described kurut of Central Asia as a winter store made of cheese or curd, salt, flour and dried meat. The same work calls qurut a kind of tarhana, the winter dish, and is unsure which cheese Kashgari meant.^[15] The evidence for this wider sense is modern, and Kashgari’s gloss gives only dried curds.

Ruminant milk and mare’s milk

Dried curd is made from the milk of cattle, sheep and goats.^[16] Mare’s milk holds less of the protein that forms curd and much more sugar. It is therefore unsuitable for most dried curd products and well suited to fermented drinks.^[16] Kashgari’s example names the sheep.^[5] The mare’s milk of the herd went into kumys.

Before Kashgari

The Chinese histories describe the steppe peoples as living on meat and soured milk. The word they use, 酪, covers soured milk and curd alike. Zhonghang Yue, a eunuch of the Han court who had gone over to the Xiongnu, told Laoshang Chanyu to throw away the Han food he received. This would show that it was neither as handy nor as good as milk and 酪.^[17] A study of the dairying of the eastern steppe counts dried curd from the milk of ruminants among the dairy foods recorded for the Xiongnu period.^[16] The texts do not say whether the Chinese words meant dried curd in any particular passage.^[17] The usual Chinese name for dried curd or hard cheese is han lao, “dried lao”.^[18] A poem of the first century BC on Han victories over the Xiongnu says that the Han burned the nomads’ mek-lwa, a word found nowhere else. A commentator explains it as “dried lao” and says that the nomads used it to start the fermentation.^[19] The study that notes this regards the stores of dried curd as the winter food of the nomads, so that burning them struck at their livelihood like the burning of the grain stores of farmers.^[20] It finds no word for curd or cheese in the neighbouring languages that resembles mek-lwa. In all Turkic dialects the word is qurut, and Mongolian seems to use the same word as xorot.^[20]

The food is older than its name in the sources. Dried curd is counted among the dairy foods of the Xiongnu period. The name qurut is attested from the 1070s. Between the two, no source of the Göktürks names it.

The oldest record of the word is a few years older than the dictionary. The Kutadgu Bilig, finished at the Karakhanid court in 1069–1070, puts kurut beside yoğrut, yoghurt, among the products of the herders.^[21]

References

^ a b c Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 277
^ al. 2020, p. 3
^ al. 2020, p. 4
^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk
^ a b c Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 395
^ a b Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 367
^ a b Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 327
^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 134
^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 162,199
^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 132
^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 145
^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 341
^ a b Ögel 1978, p. 32
^ a b c Ögel 1978, p. 33
^ Ögel 1978, p. 33, 399–400
^ a b c al. 2020, p. 14
^ a b Shiji, juan 110
^ Pulleyblank 1962, p. 255
^ Pulleyblank 1962, p. 255–256
^ a b Pulleyblank 1962, p. 256
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplet 4442

Sources

Literature

Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī, Dīwān Lughat al-Turk (1072–1074)
Shevan Wilkin, Alicia Ventresca Miller, William T. T. Taylor et al., Dairy pastoralism sustained eastern Eurasian steppe populations for 5,000 years (2020)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş IV: Türklerde yemek kültürü (1978)
Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The Consonantal System of Old Chinese, Part II (1962)