Yantyk Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The Crimean meat pie that is baked, not fried

Yantyk belongs to the home and festive cooking of the Crimean Tatars, who live on the Crimean peninsula on the northern shore of the Black Sea. Minced lamb and onion are wrapped in wheat dough and baked instead of being fried in oil. Wheat and lamb are old foods of the Eurasian land, and in Crimea too they were on everyday tables from early on.

One baked in a pan, one in the oven

Two different baked pies go by the name yantyk. One wraps minced meat in the same thin dough used for the fried meat pie cheburek and cooks it in a pan with no oil; it is also known as ayaklyk chiberek. Its ingredients are those of the cheburek, and the only change is that it is baked instead of fried. The other is a boat-shaped pie of dough enriched with butter and eggs, baked in the oven, with an opening left in the middle. Here even the dough is not the cheburek's. To finish, the pies are brushed with butter as they come out, or a piece of butter is set in the opening of the boat-shaped kind.

A recipe article on Russia Beyond, an English-language site, says yantyk is sometimes called a 'dry cheburek' because it is cooked without oil, and presents it as a sibling of the cheburek that differs only in being baked instead of fried. That description fits the pan-baked kind, which on the southern coast of Crimea is called tygyz yantyk (тыгъыз янтык). The Russian-language Wikipedia gives the name yantyk (янтыкъ) to the boat-shaped pie of butter-and-egg dough baked in the oven, and lists it as a separate dish from the cheburek baked in a pan.

There is no single agreed account of the name either. The same Russia Beyond article derives it from a Crimean Tatar word meaning 'slope', 'gentle slope' or 'side', but gives no source. An etymological dictionary of the Turkic languages published in 1989 does list йа:нтык, meaning 'side', 'slope' or 'gently sloping', as a word of Tatar, Kumyk, Bashkir and other languages. It does not list Crimean Tatar among them, and it says nothing of a pie or any other dish.

Crimea also has a dry valley called Yantyk, a gully that carries no stream for most of the year. Books on place names read the valley's name in three ways: from a Turkic word for a kind of pie, from a word for 'thistle', or from 'slope'. No record has yet been found to show whether the valley or the pie had the name first.

Two views of the pie's beginnings stand side by side. One sees it as a relative of the fried cheburek, a pie baked in Crimean Tatar kitchens. The other starts from how simple the pie is to make: wrapping minced meat in thin dough is an easy construction, and the Turkic and Mongolic nomads have many meat pies like it, so yantyk may not have arisen in Crimea alone but may be one of many meat pies that grew up in different places out of a food culture the nomads shared. The Russia Beyond article, too, places yantyk's beginnings in nomadic life, again without citing a source. Neither view has an old record to settle it, and no source has yet been found that shows how long yantyk has been baked. No legend about its origin is attached to yantyk itself, and when and where this way of baking began is not known.