Cağ kebabı

Cağ kebabı is the horizontal döner of Erzurum in eastern Turkey: lamb layered with its own fat on a long spit, turned on its side in front of a wood fire, and carved not in shavings but in thick slices that are threaded onto small skewers, the cağ, and handed to the table one skewer at a time. It is older than the upright döner and most Turkish food historians treat it as the form from which the vertical version was adapted in the nineteenth century. In Erzurum, and in the town of Oltu which claims it just as firmly, the kebab is a lunch dish eaten in restaurants that cook nothing else, with the master standing at the fire all day; the dish has had a protected geographical indication since 2009, and the register fixes the meat as lamb, the marinade as onion, salt and black pepper, and the fire as oak or beech wood.