Qurut, shlombe and the dairy of the herders

At a glance

• One milking becomes five foods with five Pashto names: yoghurt maste (مستې), buttermilk shlombe, butter kuch, ghee ghwaṛi (غوړی) and the dried curd qurut, which Encyclopaedia Iranica writes korot. [4, 7]

• Shaking the yoghurt in a goatskin hung from a tripod is women's work. The butter is lifted out, and the buttermilk is drunk or turned into more curd. [5, 7]

• In the Pashtun country of the east and south, a household did not sell fresh milk, yoghurt or buttermilk, but it did sell butter, cheese and qurut. [5, 9]

• Elphinstone listed qurut among the ordinary food of the people of the Afghan country and wrote that shepherds took it and their ghee to sell in the towns. [2]

• Powindah caravans brought ghee from Ghazni to Dera Ismail Khan, and a Pashto writer of 2011 still counts ghee, milk and qurut in the Kuchi herders' share of the market. [3, 4]

Five words for one milk

Iranica's entry on churning gives the whole chain in Pashto. Milk is first turned into yoghurt, maste. From yoghurt there are two roads. One heats, filters, salts and dries it into curds, Pashto korot. The other churns it, to separate butter, kuch, from buttermilk, shlombe. Most of the butter is melted into ghee, ghwaṛi. Most of the buttermilk is drunk, and the rest is made into curd by the methods used for yoghurt. [7]

Pashto writers spell the same words in script. Habibullah Ghamkhor, writing in Pashto in 2011 about the Kuchi herders, lists their products as meat, milk (shede, شيدې), yoghurt (maste, مستې), ghee (غوړی), wool and skins. [4]

Raverty's dictionary of 1860, the work of a British officer, has the same words. It gives mastah as coagulated milk or buttermilk, and kurut as "coagulated milk boiled, a kind of cheese". It lists shlombey as an eastern word for buttermilk and sour milk, used in the plural only. [1]

The sources differ on what qurut is. Elphinstone's footnote calls it "the hardened curd". Raverty says the milk is boiled. Susanne Gura's 2006 review of pastoral economies for the IUCN calls it "dried curd" in one place and "dried whey" in another. [1, 2, 5] Iranica says the method depends on the region and the cook. [7]

Qurut is also a word that travelled. Iranica's entry on kashk says the Baluch of Iranian Baluchistan seem to have dropped the Persian word and taken up qorut, which they may have borrowed from their Pashtun neighbours. It adds that Pashtuns themselves use kashk for something else, a thick broth or a soup with pieces of bread, on the authority of Aslanov's Pashto-Russian dictionary. [8]

The churn

The commonest nomad churn in the Persian world, Iranica says, is a goatskin bag, Pashto gaṛchka, large enough for ten to twelve kilograms of yoghurt with water added. [7] The usual way is to hang it from a wooden tripod, Pashto darbale, and shake it to and fro. In most of Afghanistan the worker sits to do it. A simpler way, recorded among nomads in eastern Afghanistan, is to roll the filled bag on the ground or in the lap. [7]

Pots do the same work in settled country. Pashto has several names for clay churns, jag, chatay and matay, and for the open pot of north-eastern Afghanistan, kaṭay. In that region a spiral paddle, manḍanu, is turned first one way and then the other by a strap wound round its shaft. [7]

Iranica says shaking a suspended skin or moving a pot on a surface is universally women's work. Where both men and women churn, as in the Persian examples it gives, the small batch for the house is the woman's, in a shaken skin or pot, and the large batch for the market is the man's, with a paddle in an open skin. A churning takes forty minutes to two hours. A kilogram of butter needs about six kilograms of sheep's-milk yoghurt or twelve of goat's, on figures Iranica takes from studies of Iranian herders. The butter comes out in flakes, which are pressed. [7]

Ghee is the part that keeps. Elphinstone noted that clarified butter "keeps long without spoiling", and that the cream the herders ate was either common cream or kaymak, made from boiled milk. [2]

What Elphinstone saw at the herders' camps

Mountstuart Elphinstone, a British envoy whose account of the Afghan country appeared in 1815, listed qurut, which he spelled croot, among the ordinary food of the people. The food of the common people, in his words, was "bread, croot, clarified butter, and occasionally flesh and cheese". In spring the shepherds and villagers also ate "a great deal of curds, cheese, milk, cream, and butter". [2]

He gave the herders' summers a page of their own. Toba, a summer pasture of the Achakzai, he wrote, was covered in summer with the camps of Durranis and Tarins, who visited one another and feasted in the open air, and "croot, maust, curds, cream, cheese, butter, and every thing that is produced from milk, are in abundance", with lamb in season. When snow began to fall on the hilltops, the shepherds dispersed to Urghessaun, Pisheen and Rabaut. His footnote defines maust as the soft, slightly acid curd called dhye in India and yoghurt in Turkey. [2]

The dairy runs through his accounts of the tribes. The tribes of the Daman "live more on flesh, croot, and other produce of their flocks". [2] The Sherani ate bread of maize, butter and qurut, and qurut was "a luxury seldom enjoyed but by those who keep sheep". [2] The Waziris ate their meat with qurut and unleavened bread. [2] The Nasir, Powindah herders who spent the cold months on the plains below Takht-i Sulaiman and went back to Khorasan when its snow melted, "depend entirely on their flocks and herds": the ewe's milk "affords the cheese, butter, and croot, which is their usual diet", and the sale of their produce and the hire of their camels buys the few things they need from outside. [2] Of the Durrani shepherds he wrote that some went to the towns "occasionally to sell their croot and clarified butter, their felts and blankets". [2]

For the guest's bread, qurut and ghee, and the rota of hosts that supplied them in the hujra, see Pashtun food and the table of hospitality and Melmastia.

Seasons

The herders' year set the dairy's year. The abundance of qurut, butter and cream Elphinstone describes at Toba belongs to the summer camp. [2] The 1884 gazetteer of Dera Ismail Khan, a British compilation, puts "the great ghi season" of the district's sheep from March to the end of June. It says shepherds arrange for ewes to lamb in winter so that the lambs are weaned before it begins, and estimates that fifty ewes in full milk give ten or twelve seers of milk a day and about half a seer of ghee. It adds that much of the goats' milk is drunk and not made into ghee at all. [3]

Winter is when the preserved part is eaten. Iranica's entry on kashk says qorut is well known and much appreciated as a hot condiment for winter use among rural Afghans. [8]

Ghamkhor's article explains how the herders' year was laid out before the wars. In his account the transit herders spent autumn and winter beyond the Pakistan border, and in summer went up to the highland pastures, from Panjshir and the Hindu Kush to Bamyan, Ghazni, Zabul, Kandahar, Helmand, Herat and Ghor. He writes that after the fall of Daoud Khan's government the crossing stopped, and that only herds from parts of Paktia, Paktika and Khost might still cross the line. [4] Fabrizio Foschini of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, writing in 2013, found that many groups still migrated seasonally but increasingly turned their moves towards Kabul. [6]

Selling the surplus, and not the milk

Fresh milk was not for sale. Gura's review, summarising a paper by Eberhard Halbach and Wais Ahmad, says milk and dairy products were sold in the Kabul region and the north, but in the Pashtun areas of eastern and southern Afghanistan milk was for the home and "it was considered shameful to sell fresh dairy products like milk, yoghurt or buttermilk". A surplus went freely to relatives and the needy, but "butter, cheese and qurut (dried whey) were sold". [5]

May Jeong, writing in Slate in 2013 about the Kabul dairy unions, found the rule alive. Afghan custom, she wrote, demanded that surplus milk be made into chekka, a kind of sour cream, or into qurut, and farmers told the union organisers that selling milk was as offensive as selling their mother's milk. Asked why, Afghans told her it was "simply Pashtun tradition". [9] Gura's review adds that after two pilot milk-marketing schemes in Kandahar and Kabul, even Kandahar's taboo seemed weaker than it had been. [5]

The rule left butter, cheese and qurut as the milk products that could be sold. Gura's review also says ghee, qurut and some cheese are generally prepared and marketed by women. It cites Christine Jost's 2004 study of the Registan Kuchi, which puts men in charge of the animals and of sales away from the tent, and women in charge of the household and of sales around the tent. [5]

Ghee on the trade roads

The Powindah caravans carried dairy down the Gomal road. The 1884 gazetteer lists what they brought from each centre of the Khorasan trade: from Ghazni, madder, wool, ghee, tobacco and asafoetida. It also records wool and ghee among the exports of the Thal country. [3] The Dera Ismail Khan article describes the road and the tribes who used it.

Ghamkhor, looking back from 2011, says the Kuchis' products were meat, milk, yoghurt, ghee, wool and skins, and that before the civil war thousands of tonnes of wool and skins went to foreign markets, among them the Soviet Union and Britain, while part was used at home. He ends by saying that, in spite of the hardships of their life, the Kuchis had won a share in Afghanistan's exports of wool and hides, and in the home market a share of "the ghee, the milk and the qurut": da ghwaṛyo, shedo aw qurto barkha (د غوړيو، شيدو او قرتو برخه). [4]

Foschini writes that the Kuchis enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the meat and dairy trade in the decades before the war and have lost it. In his footnote, Kuchis might hire out pack animals in the idle winter months, carry out specialised trade or run seasonal shops with livestock products in the bazaar. [6] He also notes that Powindah refers to Pashtun tribes of both the Durrani and Ghilzai confederations. [6]

Qurut in the kitchen

Iranica's entry names qurut a winter condiment. [8] Of the dishes cooked with it, the recipe writer Christi Qazi, on the Afghanistan Online site, gives ketcheree qurut shola, which she calls very popular in Afghanistan and slow to make: sticky rice cooked with mung beans, served with meatballs and a bowl of qurut mixed with yoghurt and water, with hot oil and mint poured over it and Afghan bread beside it. [10]

The rice dish of the festive table is in Kabuli palaw, and the drink that follows a hujra meal is in Green tea and kahwa.