Exchange Eats: Musings on Meat Jelly

Illustrations by Grace McKenna

After a nineteen hour odyssey across the entirety of Europe and half of Asia, Kyrgyzstan appropriately greeted me with a plate of meat jelly. Said carnivorous concoction unassumingly supported me as a platter of organised cold stability, an antidote to my burning embarrassment upon having woken up my host mother, father and sister at 4am on a Sunday. My timely arrival was accompanied by the cacophonous circus of three suitcases, each demanding to be privately chaperoned in the quarter-of-a-metre squared lift of my Brezhnevka block in Bishkek’s Mikroreyon Djal 23. I am clearly particularly apt at first impressions. Food is famously a gracious conversational crutch, particularly in the gelatinised form, and I am not referring to Haribo gummy rings. 

I wholeheartedly acknowledge how polarising, or wobbly if you will, my first sentence is, particularly among those familiar with anti-meat jelly meme discourse. Aspic, holodets, Slavic meat jelly, galaretka or what the internet has steadfastly blacklisted as a culinary abomination, my Polish heritage pangs at each ‘when you have to come home from a long shift just to eat meat jelly meme’. Akin to the suspended shreds of meat, it seems the internet’s increasingly opinionated opinions are also floating between murky disgust and genuine concerned confusion. I therefore will tread, or rather bounce, carefully as I pay homage to this meaty concoction in a pivotal ode to the trials, tribulations, yet also wins of cultural immersion and exposure. 

Ever since I accepted the early hours offer of holodets, an edible trajectory has followed me. Food has substituted language where grammar tables fall short. Sporadic meal times in my adoptive fourth-floor flat have defined my Kyrgyz culinary trajectory thus far. The intimacy of mealtimes with your new randomly assigned family can only truly be expressed through the deafening silence between them and your inability to recall and apply verb tenses. Between spoonfuls of lagman, plov and borsh, I have exploited, or rather rethought, meal times to be a linguistic endeavour, somewhat of a test match in which verb conjugations come out to play but food is substituted as racket or ball. I shake my head in alternating directions in the feigned guise of culinary conversational wit, accompanied by the occasional wow when my neck tires- it truly is a hard old life being a full time host daughter. 

Food thus catalyses cultural discovery as I have equally discovered through my friendship with my 8 year old host cousin. We are matched and levelled on par with my thusfar childlike linguistic capabilities and food tastes. I ask her about her favourite colours and K-pop singers and in return she bestows me with her utmost protection and almost decade long wisdom on Suburban Mikrorayon djal 2. I jokingly, but actually quite sincerely, call her ‘мой гид’ (my guide) as she chaperones me and handles all monetary transactions in the corner shop, or rather more appropriately the first-floor-shop, placed at the bottom of our block. The other day she laughed at me as she watched me try her favourite snack kurt (hard salty cheese balls made from fermented milk), my face writhing in sour dairy product retaliation. 

As I focused that first morning on the individual knife ridges of the portioned gelatin, I thought back to Tatyanna Tolstaya’s short story ‘Aspic’, read as a russo-curious 17-year-old keen to bulk out her personal statement. The author relates the ritualistic new year’s preparation of holodets to somewhat of a moral reckoning or ‘yearly sacrifice’, fueled by childhood fears of the dish and far corner trips to the market, past the fruit and veg, to instead the miscellaneous animal body parts section. The ‘special kind of religion’ quality applied to the dish by Tolstaya has since left me considering the weight of seemingly mundane culinary meal preparation on cultural memory.

Tolstaya’s viscerally described hopeless and frankly grim meat jelly allegory does not render western view on the dish at all surprising. Originally developed by way of food preservation, it constitutes a definite resourcefulness lost in modern western culinary practice, repurposing bones, hooves, connective tissues and other gelatinous portions, ironically deemed too animalistic by most carnivorous consumers. Historically a delicacy of wealth and prestige, it has now fallen victim to widespread internet misunderstanding. An aesthetically challenged dish, it has not been given a chance, with much internet content capitalising on its aesthetic disadvantages for views. After all, there is only so much visual reconciliation a sprinkling of dill and a tablespoon of horseradish can harbour. It seems that the contemporary taste palette demands it to be repackaged and made palatable- shot, directed and produced in a Bourdain style YouTube short or rebranded as a collagen wellness gummy (it truly does trump botox with its dense collagen reserves). I then beg the question of whether our increasingly aesthetic-focused fancies hinder our willingness towards cultural exposure? Yes, this is a call to meat offcut wholesalers to employ me as aspic’s PR manager.

From that very first morning, holodets has thus represented a condensely gelatinised cultural nugget that I would let slide by, however slippery and intangible of a mass it may be. As a remnant of post-Soviet influence here in Kyrgyzstan and across former Soviet republics, the dinner table thus constitutes the acme of cultural witness, a living  modern artefact- especially at 4:37 in the morning. Said morning’s meat jelly was accompanied by kimchi, testament to the Korean Kyrgyz (Koryo Saram) population, deported from Russia’s far eastern Siberia to Central Asia just over 80 years ago, again witness of the kitchen as a socio-cultural and historical medley. 

Therefore, dear readers, I politely ask you to reconsider the slander of cultural food memes, however funny they may be (I am not a food scrooge). I will continue to promote culinary discomfort as integral to improving general intercultural effectiveness and cultural literacy. After all, nothing grows in your comfort zone, especially nothing tasty…