A woman cooking in a large piot in her yurt in Hovd Province, Mongolia, in 1996. (STEPHEN G. DONALDSON PHOTOGRAPHY)Cuisine—Mongolia
Traditional Mongolian foods have been and remain whatever the Mongols can obtain from their flocks (above all, milk, usually consumed fermented; more rarely, meat, generally boiled) and by hunting or gathering (or today, by importing). In general, these foods are monotonous, and access is highly seasonal and uneven. The Mongols also eat a number of bread foods when they can get access to flour. These foods are often in forms borrowed from a larger Eurasian world, e.g., the varieties of boov (from the Chinese baozi, meaning bread or bread food) that range from pastry to steamed dumplings similar to those eaten in China. Mongols also directly use grain, ground or semiground, in such dishes as tsampa (buttered grain). Tea is now ubiquitous, most popularly as suutei tsay (Mongolian tea), made by long boiling of compressed bricks of tea in milk, with various additives, including butter or cream. Elites living a more completely sedentary life have often assimilated the foods of neighboring Russians and Chinese. In Inner Mongolia, for example, urban Mongols and the best-educated often serve foods that are more North Chinese than Mongolian, strictly speaking, but these North Chinese foods themselves have been heavily assimilated from central Eurasia by centuries of contact.
Mongolian cuisine was not always so dull as this description implies; the Mongols were once briefly arbiters of international taste, as is evidenced by the rich cuisine of the Yinshan zhengyao (Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor's Food and Drink), presented to the Mongolian court in China in 1330 by its author, the Sino-Uighur dietary physician Hu Sihui. In this work, whose recipes for traditional foods run the gamut from roast wolf to a Kashmiri curry eaten with a fennel yeasted bread, there is an underlying foundation of shulen (banquet soups). These are exquisite blends of lamb, spices, and ingredients from one end of Asia to the other, melded in an attempt to create a cuisine that has a little something for everyone but is, at the same time, firmly based in a Mongolian love of boiling.
Paul D. Buell
Further Reading
Buell, Paul D. (1990) "Pleasing the Palate of the Qan: Changing Foodways of the Imperial Mongols." Mongolian Studies, 13: 57–81.
——, and Eugene N. Anderson. (2000) A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-hui's Yin-shan Cheng-yao. Appendix by Charles Perry. London: Kegan Paul International.
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