Kashk is found in the cuisines of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, the Caucasus, and Turkey. This expansive geographic area contains different language groups, contributing to the complexity of pinpointing the development and usage of this term. In some languages it is called kashk or kishkh, (Persian: کشک, Arabic: كشك, Kurdish: keşk, Turkish: keş peyniri), qurut in others (Kazakh: құрт, Turkmen: gurt, Uzbek: qurt, Azerbaijani: qurut, Kyrgyz: курут, Pashto: قروت, Turkish: kurut, sürk, taş yoğurt, kurutulmuş yoğurt, Shor: қурут, Khakas: хурут). There are many varied names for this class of dishes including jameed (Arabic: جميد), chortan (Armenian: չորթան) and aaruul, khuruud (Mongolian: ааруул, хурууд). Chortan is mentioned in the 19th century Armenian epic poem Daredevils of Sassoun, said to be based on an 8th-century oral tradition.[10][11]
According to Francoise Aubaile-Sallenave, the first known literary use of the term comes from the Armenian historian Yeghishe. In the 10th-century Persian Shahnameh ("Book of Kings") by Firdausi the term is used in the sense of "barley flour", but it's also used for a mixture of cracked wheat and cracked barley. Aubaile-Sallenave argues that the original Persian kashk known from early Persian literature was made with barley that contained either a mix of leaven with water or some fermented milk. To answer questions about the modern meaning in Iran for a dried dairy dish she argued "Iranian speaking pastorialists, for whom dried sour yogurt was a staple, and who had no easy access to barley, applied the word kashk by analogy to dry sour milk". Charles Perry offers an alternate explanation based on the 13th century Arabic cookbook Wasf al-Atimah al-Mutadah which says dried yogurt was a Turkomen style "kashk".