Gulmira's Kitchen

Smoked fish from the reservoir road

My husband's brother drives to the Toktogul side twice a year for work and brings back smoked fish from the stalls on the road, hung on strings in the wind like laundry. Silver, hard, salty, they smell like a bonfire at the lake. Three fish is 21 som.

How to eat: peel the skin, pull the meat from the bone, eat with plain bread, a raw onion, black tea. Nothing else. The fish is not a cooking ingredient, the fish is a story that you eat.

The reservoir from the road. My brother-in-law took the picture on his phone, with his thumb in it.

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