Ižtreyan Cuisine
Ižtreyan meals are communal, taken at large, circular tables, ornately inlaid with brightly colored tiles or stone or metal fragments, that serve as the centerpieces of ižtreyan homes and feature prominently in the back-rooms of ižtreyan workplaces. An ižtreyan meal will involve a handful of main dishes and several smaller side dishes that are shared by everyone, heaped onto individual plates or bowls.
Certain dishes show up as sides at every meal, ubiquitous small plates called talots: these are considered obligatory to the degree that meal size and formality is characterized by the number of talotsa present, with a two-talotsa meal being considered the bare minimum for any meal, while a ten-talotsa meal is a veritable feast. (An ižtrey would never serve a meal with only one talots: in fact, the idiom “a one-talots meal” is used among ižtreya to connote a thing that is completely and unacceptably lacking or unfinished.)
A characteristic talots, known well even outside ižtreyan cities, is rask, which is a variety of tiny, walnut-sized bread, baked quickly in large quantities and served in large bowls with a dusting of salt, usually made of a combination of wheat and buckwheat flour and—less often—chopped nuts. Others include tsalšak, or wafers of dried cucumber softened and served in a tangy yoghurt-based sauce, reželdo, or chopped salted sardines or herring, and gelbrekhi, or fried vegetables in a buckwheat-honey batter.
Among the small bites are the large dishes. A meal with one or two people will likely have one large dish, but when eating as a family, a community, or a workplace, people will often serve several to even dozens of central dishes. Ižtreyan meals often include meats in flavorful sauces and various baked goods. Centerpiece dishes like this include:
- žyotsuldo: a roasted savory pie with a buckwheat crust, usually sprinkled with some small pieces cheese shortly before being removed from the oven. A žyotsuldo can be filled with just about anything, but popular choices include beets, marinated beef, or chopped mushrooms. (It's rather uncommon for ižtreyan cities to have stalls for street food or other casual-and-easy-to-acquire foods—it would run contrary to the camaraderie of a proper five-talotsa meal, an ižtrey might tell you!—but when such stalls exist, they often sell an easy-to-carry variation on žyotsuldo.)
- yadash, a roasted, creamed soup of a central flavor (often beets, but sometimes peppers or rhubarb) and a backing, milder flavor (potatoes or yams): this is served with a drizzle of honey and a thick dusting of black pepper, and sometimes a buckwheat flatbread called kyaczut.
- lyubešku ikhab (or other lyubešk dishes): ikhab is a generic word for red meat, and lyubešk is a style of cooking that involves a slow braise in wine with dried berries and raw grain kernels, usually barley. Over the course of the braise, the grains and berries puff up with the wine and meat juices, and the meat takes on a characteristic pink color. It's possible to lyubešk-cook poultry (lyubešk trabšo) or some vegetables like thicker, meatier mushrooms (lyubešk rabsin), but the lyubešk style is usually associated with red meats.
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