kashk and kishk are the two most usual vocalizations of the same word current in the Middle East. As Françoise Aubaile-Sallenave (1994) puts it, at the beginning of a detailed and authoritative essay, these ‘occur in several cultural areas—Iran, Iraq, Greater Syria, Egypt, south Caucasia and Turkey—and represent very different language families: Indo-European, Semitic, Altaic, Caucasic’.
As if that were not already more than enough complexity, the word has several quite different meanings.
By origin the word kashk is Persian and it seems to have meant originally a barley product. The meaning ‘barley flour’ is found in the Shahnameh, the Persian ‘Book of Kings’ by the 10th-century poet Firdausi.
