shashlik

n.
A dish consisting of marinated cubes of lamb or beef grilled or roasted on a spit, often with slices of eggplant, onion, and tomato; shish kebab.

[Russian shashlyk, of Turkish origin.]

from Crimean Turkish
This word originated in Ukraine

The Crimea is a peninsula extending from the south shore of Ukraine into the Black Sea. In English it was made famous by a war with Russia in the 1850s that stimulated Alfred Tennyson to write "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and stimulated Florence Nightingale to revolutionize the treatment of wounded soldiers. But though the Crimea remained in Russian hands after that war, it had been Turkish for the three preceding centuries, and much of the population had spoken a version of Turkish known as Crimean Turkish.

It would take too long to tell of the Russian and then Soviet dispersal of this population, especially to Uzbekistan, and the return of large numbers of them after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in their tribulations and travels, speakers of Crimean Turkish seem to have taken time to present the Turks, the Russians, and the rest of the world with a particular kind of food and their name for it: shashlik. It reached English relatively recently, attested in the 1925 book Paris on Parade, published in Indianapolis.

Lamb or sturgeon is especially recommended as the main ingredient of shashlik. You cut the meat or fish into cubes marinate it overnight perhaps in oil, lemon juice salt, pepper, bay leaf, dill, garlic, and celery, and then cook the cubes with vegetables on skewers over a fire.

This sounds like shish kebab, our term from Armenian and Turkish. And in fact, thanks to the mixing of populations and recipes, shashlik and shish kebab have become synonymous in English. One is often defined as the other. But in Russian it is just shashlik, and in Russian contexts we can find shashlik evoking a Crimean scene, as in Bruce McClelland's translation of Osip Mandelstam's poem about Theodosia, a Crimean resort where he lived in 1919:

Today Crimean Turkish is spoken by perhaps 200,000 people in the Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine, and by nearly 200,000 in Uzbekistan, as well as a few in Turkey. It is distinct enough from the national language of Turkey to be considered a separate language, but the two are closely related members of the Altaic language family. Nothing else of Crimean Turkish is part of the general English vocabulary.

---

Grilled lamb on a skewer.

Shashlik is a Turkish dish of marinated lamb. The marinade usually consists of onions, olive oil, and paprika. The lamb is skewered and grilled and served with scallions.

— CLIFFORD A. WRIGHT

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)