How a Crimean meat kebab travelled thousands of miles to become a South Dakota obsession

Chislic may look like a simple meat skewer, but its journey from the Black Sea to the American Great Plains tells a much bigger story.

At Meridian Corner, a roadhouse amid the corn and alfalfa fields of Freeman in South Dakota, my lunch took about 40 seconds to arrive at the table: five sticks of lamb and five of mutton, deep-fried and served with garlic salt and crackers.

This is chislic – South Dakota's most beloved light bite, often eaten as an appetiser or snack between meals. Here in the town of Freeman, it's ubiquitous, served in bars, restaurants, and homes across this south-eastern pocket of the state. Drive much beyond it, however, and people may have no idea what you're talking about. 

"I grew up eating chislic and never thought much about it," town archivist Marnette Hofer told me. "Then I went to college in Kansas, and nobody knew about it. I don't think people in the Black Hills – in South Dakota! – had a clue."

Chislic may be distinctly South Dakotan, but its roots lie thousands of miles away, around the Black Sea. So how did it become so thoroughly local that, in 2018, the state legislature made it the official state "nosh"?

From Crimea to Dakota

In the 1870s, Germans from Russia began arriving in what was then Dakota Territory, bringing with them traditions from their former homes around the Black Sea. Hofer, who grew up in the area and serves as the executive director of its Heritage Hall Museum & Archives, took me through its exhibits chronicling the historic passage. As she showed me around its exhibits, we discussed chislic and the unlikely chain of events that brought it here.

While roasting meat on sticks is an ancient technique, peoples living around the Black Sea and the Caucasus traditionally cut their meat into small chunks before skewering it on metal rods, or even swords. Russian troops encountered this style of cooking among Tatars in Crimea and the Caucasus as the empire pushed south towards the Black Sea from the late 17th Century. Called "shashlyk", it was typically made with mutton, marinated in onions or vinegar and grilled on skewers – quick to prepare and easy to eat on the move.

By the late 18th Century, shashlyk had become fashionable in parts of the Russian Empire and was enthusiastically taken up by German settlers who had been encouraged to settle in Russia under Catherine the Great, many of whom later established communities around the Black Sea. But in the 1870s, as Tsar Alexander II revoked privileges long granted to its German settlers, including their religious freedom and exemption from military service, many began emigrating. Among the things they carried with them were recipes.  

"And President Abraham Lincoln had eight years previously enacted the Homestead Act of 1862, promising cheap land on the American frontier," recounts Tim Waltner, the Heritage Hall's education and communication coordinator. "If you stayed on five years, the land was yours."

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