Home › Skewer Combinations › Shish-Kebab
Shish-Kebab
Soak cubes of lamb several hours in wine-red is bestalong with a lot of chopped onions and some chopped parsley. If metal skewers are used, silverplated ones are preferred, because they impart no sharp metallic taste. But carrying skewers to the woods is coals-to-Newcastle waste; just cut your own from any tasty wood. Avoid oak or willow, for both are bitter; pine will make your cabob taste as if it had been dipped in a paint can. Hickory sticks are fine, and sassafras, which grows like a pest all over the middle East, is appetizingly odorous. Hawthorn, wild plum, fruit trees, berry and hazelnut bushes all make good skewers. Just take a lick of the peeled wood and you will know whether it is a good one for cooking or not.
Stick a piece of tomato on each skewer to start with; then a square of bacon, a bay leaf, and a lamb cube; another bay leaf, a square of bacon and a lamb cube; then a bay leaf and a square of bacon, finishing with another chunk of tomato. Salt and pepper everything, and grill. If you want to follow the Turkish spirit to the end, have a pot of well seasoned, hot, boiled rice ready, into which has been dumped plenty of chopped pimientos and chopped ripe and green olives.
There is a good picnic party idea in the big shish-kebabs that are done on roasting spits at the open doors of small restaurants all over town in Constantinople. The spit is set upright before a charcoal grill, and dozens of pieces of lamb, alternating with seasonings and onion rings, are impaled on it until a cylinder is formed as big around as a leg of lamb. On top are fastened tomatoes and a whole big onion from which the juices escape over the meat to baste it automatically, and run down into a pan set below to catch the gravy. As fast as the outside meat cooks it is slivered off with a sharp knife, so there is a continual supply to keep up with the demand until the spit is empty. If you did this before a backyard barbecue fireplace, you could serve rice with it, already cooked on the kitchen range, then casaba melon for dessert, and finish off on Turkish coffee flavored with rose water, accompanied by liqueur glasses of arrack-a complete and aromatic meal from the Orient, for a dozen people or more.
A loose, discursive set of instructions rather than a formula: no quantities, times or temperatures are given, so the cook supplies all three. The most consequential decision here is the wood, not the meat.
- Skewer wood is a safety choiceHickory, hazel and hawthorn are sound. Avoid yew, oleander, rhododendron and cherry laurel outright. The green wood and bark of Prunus species (cherry, peach, plum) contain cyanogenic compounds, though the same woods are commonly used for smoking, so brief contact is a small risk -- note that the author's own wild plum and fruit trees fall in this group. The taste test will not reliably identify a toxic shrub; if you cannot name it with certainty, use metal or soaked bamboo.
- SassafrasPraised here for its scent, but safrole, the aromatic compound in sassafras root and bark, was barred as a food additive in the United States in 1960. A brief contact with hot meat is not the same as drinking sassafras tea, but there is no reason to seek it out for skewers now.
- Metal skewersSilverplate is no longer the point of comparison. Flat or twisted stainless skewers are better than round ones for a different reason: cubes will not spin when you turn them.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For four people, figure 1 1/2 to 2 lb boneless lamb shoulder or leg in 1 1/4-inch cubes, two cups of red wine, two large onions chopped, a handful of parsley, about 8 oz bacon cut in squares, and a dozen bay leaves.
- Marinate cold"Several hours" should be spent in the refrigerator, not on a counter, and 4 to 12 hours is plenty. Drain and pat the cubes dry before skewering or the wet marinade will steam the surface instead of browning it.
- Bacon and flare-upsSquares of bacon dripping onto live coals will flame and blacken the lamb. Build the fire so there is a cooler zone to shift the skewers to, and keep the grate 4 to 5 inches above medium-hot coals rather than directly over the hottest bed.
- Grilling time and donenessCubes of this size want roughly 8 to 12 minutes total, turned every few minutes, to reach 130-135F for medium-rare at the center. Lamb shoulder past 150F goes dry and tightens on the skewer.
- The bay leavesThey are there to perfume the meat as it cooks. Whole bay leaves stay sharp and leathery even after grilling and should be pulled off before eating, not chewed.
- The upright spitWhat is described is a döner: a vertical charcoal grill with a loaded upright spindle, shaved as the outside cooks. A home rotisserie will not reproduce it, and the tall column of stacked lamb is difficult to bring to a safe temperature evenly. Treat that passage as description rather than instruction.
- The menuCasaba melon can be swapped for any ripe honeydew or Crenshaw. Arrack here means the anise spirit of the eastern Mediterranean, sold as raki or arak; rose water for the coffee is stocked by most Middle Eastern groceries.
Shish kebab is a straight borrowing of Turkish şiş kebap, skewer roast, and the spelling wobbled for decades in English cookbooks before settling. The reference to restaurants \"all over town in Constantinople\" dates the writing: the city was officially Istanbul from 1930, though the older name lingered in American print for years after. Skewered lamb over coals long predates any of this, being the natural cookery of herding societies with fuel to spare and no oven, but its arrival on American picnic pages belongs to the interwar taste for the picturesque \"Orient\" — hence the whole staged menu of pimiento rice, melon, rose-water coffee and a glass of arrack. The advice to cut skewers from whatever grows nearby is the older and more practical half of the tradition, and the note that oak and willow taste bitter is the kind of thing learned by trial rather than read.