40 Fun Facts About Kebab

Tradition says shish kebab was invented by medieval soldiers who grilled meat over open fires on what?

Their swords doubled as skewers, the story goes: şiş is the Turkish word for both. In Turkey the vegetables are usually grilled on a separate skewer from the meat.

Döner kebap, the Turkish name behind the doner kebab, literally describes which kind of roast?

Rotating roast is the literal meaning: döner comes from dönmek, the Turkish verb for turning. The stacked meat revolves beside the heat while the cook shaves off the outer layer.

In which German city did Turkish guest workers popularise the doner kebab sandwich in the early 1970s?

Berlin is where the doner sandwich took shape, sold in big portions at low prices. A 2007 survey found that many people consider it the city's most characteristic food.

Canada's donair, a doner kebab spin-off made with spiced ground beef, comes with a sweet sauce based on what?

Condensed milk, mixed with vinegar, sugar and garlic, makes donair sauce. Greek immigrant Peter Gamoulakos devised it in 1972 after his original Greek-style wraps failed to catch on.

Kapsalon, the Dutch dish of fries topped with kebab meat and Gouda, is named after which kind of business?

A hair salon is what kapsalon means in Dutch. The dish is credited to Rotterdam hairdresser Nathaniel Gomes, who asked his local kebab shop to make it for him.

Satay, Southeast Asia's skewered relative of the kebab, is most often served with a sauce made from what?

Peanuts go into the sauce so reliably that peanut sauce is often just called satay sauce. Traditional skewers were cut from the midrib of a palm frond rather than bamboo.

Anticuchos, Peru's answer to the kebab since Inca times, are most popularly made from which cut of beef?

Heart is the classic choice, sold as anticuchos de corazón from street carts. Before the Spanish arrived the skewers were made with llama, and they often come with a boiled potato on the end.

One theory links the name of Pakistan's flat, round chapli kebab to chappal, the Urdu word for which item?

Sandals are the comparison: a chapli kebab is about the shape and size of a chappal sole. A rival theory traces the name to a Pashto word meaning flat.

Testi kebabı from Central Anatolia is cooked sealed inside what, which is then broken open to serve it?

A clay jug gives the dish its name, since testi is the Turkish word for jug. The mouth is sealed with bread dough or foil before the jug goes over the fire.

Which Mexican taco filling grew out of the spit-roasted lamb that Lebanese immigrants brought to Puebla?

Al pastor means shepherd style. Its spit-roasting descends from the doner kebab, to which Mexican cooks added their own adobada marinade.

Doner kebab is best known in the United States in which Greek variation, typically served with tzatziki?

Gyros took over from the dish's older Greek name, doner, which was criticised in Greece for being Turkish. By 1970 the new word was already common in American English.

Which Levantine street food, meat shaved from a vertical spit, developed from doner kebab in the Ottoman era?

Shawarma was traditionally made with lamb or mutton, stacked in an inverted cone on the spit. In the Middle East the chicken version typically comes with garlic sauce, fries and pickles.

Souvlaki, Greece's skewered cousin of the shish kebab, is usually made with which meat?

Pork is the standard souvlaki meat, eaten straight off the skewer while hot or rolled in pita. English speakers may call the skewers kebabs, but that is not their proper name in Greece.

Chelow kabab, kebab served on steamed saffron rice, is considered the national dish of which country?

Iran counts chelow kabab as its national dish, probably created under the Qajar dynasty. In the old bazaar tradition the waiter pins the meat to the rice with flatbread and whips the skewer out.

Which ancient Greek poet describes meat roasted on spits, seen by one food writer as an early shish kebab?

Homer describes skewering strips of meat for broiling in the Odyssey, which food writer Clifford A. Wright calls an early version of shish kebab. The Iliad mentions spit-roasted meat too.

Many kebabs of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh trace their origins to the kitchens of which Indian empire?

Mughal kitchens shaped shami, seekh and many other South Asian kebabs, and the style is still known as Mughlai cuisine. Seekh kebab simply takes its name from the skewer.

Suya, a spicy kebab traditionally prepared by the Hausa people, originated in which West African country?

Nigeria is the home of suya, whose meat is coated in yaji, a Hausa spice mix built on dried hot chillies and ginger. It is most popular as an evening street food.

Shashlik, the skewered kebab of the Caucasus and Central Asia, entered English from which language?

Russian gave English the word, though its roots are Turkic: it grew from the Crimean Tatar word for spit. Shashlik only reached Moscow in the late 19th century.

The munchy box, kebab meat, pakora and chips served in a pizza box, is most associated with which Scottish city?

Glasgow takeaways made the munchy box famous, filling a pizza box with extras such as chicken tikka, samosas, chow mein and naan. The mix has been criticised as nutritionally poor.

In Egypt, where the word kebab means grilled chunks of meat, what are skewers of seasoned ground meat called?

Kofta is the Egyptian word, while Iraq does the reverse: there kebab means the ground-meat skewer and marinated chunks are called tikka.

Which Turkish town is often considered the birthplace of doner kebab, credited to local cook İskender Efendi?

Bursa is where İskender Efendi is said to have turned the lamb roasting at his father's restaurant upright in the 1850s. A rival claim credits a cook called Hamdi in Kastamonu around 1830.

Which Turkish city gives its name to a spicy kebab of hand-minced lamb grilled on a wide iron skewer?

Adana kebab was originally known simply as kıyma kebabı, the minced-meat kebab. The name is now protected: a vendor must pass an on-the-spot inspection by the city's chamber of commerce to sell the original.

Which Canadian city named the donair, its home-grown take on doner kebab, as its official food in 2015?

Halifax got its first King of Donair restaurant on Quinpool Road in 1973. The dish long stayed an Atlantic Canada speciality before spreading to other parts of the country.

Which Australian kebab-shop dish of doner meat, chips and sauces won a Word of the Year vote for 2016?

Halal snack pack was the Macquarie Dictionary's People's Choice Word of the Year. Its usual trio of chilli, garlic and barbecue sauces is sometimes known as the holy trinity.

İskender kebap, doner slices over pide bread with tomato sauce and yogurt, is finished at the table with what?

Melted butter is generally poured over the dish in front of the customer, for show. The kebab takes its name from its inventor, who lived in the late 19th-century Ottoman Empire.

Ćevapi, the Balkan grilled dish whose name comes from the word kebab, are best described as what?

Skinless sausages of grilled minced meat, ćevapi usually arrive five to ten at a time, often in flatbread with chopped onions. They are a national dish of both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.

Chuan, China's cumin-dusted lamb kebab skewers, originated among the Uyghur people of which far-western region?

Xinjiang's Uyghurs call the skewers kawap, their own form of the word kebab. Chuan has since spread across China as a street food, and in Beijing it is sometimes deep-fried.

Sosaties, South Africa's Cape Malay kebabs, commonly thread cubes of lamb with which dried fruit?

Apricots sweeten the classic sosatie, which is most often cooked outdoors on a braai. The name blends sate, meaning skewered meat, with saus, a spicy sauce.

Shami kebab, a small fried patty popular across South Asia, binds its minced meat with which ground pulse?

Chickpeas are boiled with the meat and whole spices before everything is ground and shaped into patties. One theory says the name points to Bilad al-Sham, an old name for Syria.

Lucknow's famously soft tunday ke kebab is named after its creator, a cook said to have had only one what?

One arm was all the cook Murad had, the story goes: tunda means one-armed. He is said to have won a nawab's contest to make the softest possible kebab.

Legend says India's finely ground Kakori kebab was first prepared for elderly pilgrims who had lost what?

Their teeth were gone, the legend goes, so the kebab was made from the softest possible mince. It is attributed to the town of Kakori in Uttar Pradesh.

The kati roll, a kebab wrapped in paratha bread, is said to have begun at Nizam Restaurant in which Indian city?

Kolkata's Nizam Restaurant, founded in 1932, is credited with the roll. Kati means stick in Bengali: the name stuck after the restaurant swapped heavy iron skewers for bamboo ones in 1964.

Which medieval traveller recorded that even commoners ate kebab for breakfast with naan in the Delhi Sultanate?

Ibn Battuta, the great Maghrebi traveller, also noted that kebab was served in the sultanate's royal houses. Kebab cooking went on to spread around the world in parallel with Muslim influence.

A 10th-century cookbook that describes kabāb as cut-up meat, fried or grilled, was compiled in which city?

Baghdad was home to the compiler al-Warraq, whose Kitab al-Tabikh gathers much of the legacy of Mesopotamian and Arab cooking.

Excavations on which Greek island unearthed stone supports for meat skewers, used before a 17th-century BC eruption?

Santorini's stone supports have paired notches that likely held the skewers and a line of holes to feed air to the coals. Similar portable grill trays turned up at Mycenae and Pylos.

The American Heritage Dictionary traces the word kebab to Aramaic and Akkadian roots with which probable meaning?

To burn, char or roast is the sense of the ancient East Semitic root. Turkish texts were using the word kebab as early as the 14th century.

The earliest known English use of the term shish kebab is in a 1914 novel by which American author?

Sinclair Lewis put the term in Our Mr. Wrenn, the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation. The plain word kebab had already been in English since the late 17th century.

Cağ kebabı, lamb roasted on a horizontal spit over a wood fire, is the trademark of which Turkish province?

Erzurum's Oltu district holds a Turkish geographical indication for cağ kebabı. The word cağ, meaning spit, came into Turkish from Armenian.

Kabab koobideh, minced lamb pressed around a skewer, takes its name from a verb with which meaning?

To pound is the meaning of koobidan: the meat was traditionally laid on a flat stone or log and beaten with a wooden mallet to get the right texture.

A doner kebab wrapped in thin lavash flatbread goes by which Turkish name, literally meaning roll?

Dürüm wraps usually cost more than a standard doner sandwich, and some customers prefer them for the higher ratio of filling to bread. The lavash is sometimes grilled after rolling to crisp it.