At a glance
- Meat: Lamb in roughly 1.5 cm cubes, threaded onto thin metal skewers with a slip of tail fat between the lean pieces
- Bread: Náng, a firm wheat flatbread baked against the wall of a clay tonur, used both as the plate and as the wrapper
- Spice: Whole and ground cumin, ground chili, salt, white pepper, dusted on as the meat grills rather than mixed in beforehand
- Fire: Charcoal in a long grateless trough, the skewers fanned ten to a hand and turned over the coals
- Region: Xinjiang, in China's far northwest; the skewer is kawap in Uyghur, the meat halal
- Eaten: Off the stick into a torn piece of náng, mostly at night, at sidewalk tables by the grill
The grill is a sheet-metal trough about twenty inches long with charcoal banked along the bottom and no grate over it, so the skewers rest straight on the rails with the meat suspended in the heat. The cook takes ten in each hand, holds them in a fan, and turns the whole spread together every minute or so. Lamb is cut into cubes near a centimeter and a half, and between the lean pieces sits a smaller chunk of tail fat that softens and bastes the meat from the inside as it cooks. Cumin and chili go on at the fire, sprinkled over the meat in handfuls so the spice toasts against the lamb and drifts down into the coals.
What turns the skewer into náng-jiā-náng is the move at the end: the meat is stripped off several sticks at once, sometimes a dozen, and pressed into a folded or torn piece of the flatbread. The náng is dense and baked firm on purpose, stiff enough to take a hot pile of greasy lamb without folding under it. At the contact face the crumb drinks the rendered fat and the loose cumin; the rest of the bread stays dry and chewy in the hand. One round of bread carries the meat of many skewers, and the fat that would otherwise run down a wrist soaks into wheat instead.
Náng is not a soft pocket. It is a low-water wheat dough kneaded firm, pressed flat, and stamped at the center with a docking stamp so the middle bakes flat while a thicker rim puffs around it. The baker slaps the raw round onto the inner wall of the tonur, a jar-shaped clay oven a meter tall with a wood or coal fire on its floor, and the bread bakes hanging off the wall until the crust freckles brown and crisp. Outside it goes hard and cracker-like; inside the rim it keeps a chew. Sesame and minced onion often go on top before baking. The same loaf is sold plain as a staple and, here, used as both plate and wrapper for the lamb.
The spice is the part most strangers register first, and it lands by addition rather than marinade. The lamb is mostly salted, then cumin, both whole seed and ground, and ground red chili are thrown on at the coals so they roast on the surface of the meat and form a dry, fragrant crust. That toasting is why the cumin reads warm and almost smoky rather than raw. The tail fat between the cubes keeps the lean from drying out over a fire that runs hot and fast, and the bread underneath catches whatever fat and spice the meat sheds.
It is mostly night food. After dark, Uyghur families set out low tables and stools on the sidewalk by the grill, and in summer more than a hundred stalls can line a street in Ürümqi, the smoke from the coals hanging over the whole block. Lamb here is the everyday meat where most of China cooks pork; the grill is halal, and the skewer is one of the foods that carried Xinjiang east, common on Beijing streets by the 1980s. Eating is unhurried and by hand, the bread doing the work a plate and a napkin would do somewhere else, the cumin smell carrying down the row of stalls.
Origin: the Xinjiang grill and the clay-oven bread
Both halves of the dish come out of Xinjiang's place on the old caravan routes across Central Asia. The lamb is raised on highland pasture; the cumin and chili came west to east along the same roads; the coal was mined from nearby hills. The grilled skewer belongs to the Muslim Uyghur and Hui communities of the northwest, where it is called kawap in Uyghur, and it shares a lineage with the spiced grilled meats eaten across Central Asia and farther toward the Middle East.
Náng is older and more settled than any single grill stall. The flatbread is documented in the region across roughly two thousand years, baked in the clay tonur and counted in hundreds of local forms, from rounds the size of a cartwheel down to ones no bigger than an egg. Its whole reason for being is keeping: a firm, low-moisture loaf travels and stores for days, which is why it could feed herders and caravan traffic long before it propped up a pile of skewered meat.
The pairing itself is the new part. The skewer rode out of Xinjiang into the rest of China in the late twentieth century, a fixture of Beijing street grills by the 1980s, while the bread stayed the regional staple it had always been. Náng-jiā-náng is what happens when the two oldest things on a Xinjiang table, the cumin lamb off the coals and the bread off the tonur wall, are handed over together with no plate in between.