Mongolian Cuisine

For quite a long period of time there have been circulating horrible rumors concerning Mongolian dishes. Allegedly they ate everything they could chew. Pope of Rome’s ambassador Plano Carpini, who visited Mongolia in the middle of the 13th century, wrote that Mongolians ate dogs, wolves, foxes, horses and even humans. The latter was attested by Marco Polo too. Surely most of the things considered in those years to be dainties cause no affection nowadays. Moreover, they seem disgusting. Why should one, for example, try and catch steppe mice if he has enough beef and mutton?

Traditions of Mongolian Cuisine

Still many recipes and methods of cooking came from those far hungry years of the Middle Ages. As it was a thousand years ago, diverse soups constitute a great part of the national menu. We should note here that anything fried is not popular in Mongolia. And it is quite natural, for in the steppe you can’t find even a twig, to say nothing about firewood. That’s why they preferred to boil or to cook by steam. But more often they just jerked or smoked meat, or acted in the following way — they put slips of meat under the saddles and after a day’s ride the meat was cooked.

Khar-khoh — Traditional Mongolian Dish

Khar-khoh is a dish cooked from mutton according to the ancient recipe. Fresh meat, vegetables and potatoes are cut and put into a flask standing over an open fire. They are boiled in fresh water with smooth stones, which are thrown inside the flask for meat and trimming to get slightly fried. In half an hour the dish is ready.

Meat

In general, meat dishes constitute the basic part of Mongolian Cuisine. They are cooked in the same way as khar-khoh. The only difference is that instead of the flask they more often use the fell of the animal. Such dishes are cooked only on occasion of guests or holiday, as the process is rather undertaking.

Mongolians like dishes from boiled non-salted mutton very much. However, beef, horse-flesh, goat-flesh and meat of camels, yaks and saigaks are widely used too.

The most characteristic method of cooking meat consists in drying thin long stripes of meat in the wind without any preprocessing. Simple Mongolian meat dishes, without any trimmings and seasonings (except for dried onions) require, nevertheless, long-term cooking, for meat is boiled or dried in huge amounts.

Milk and Scum

The most popular dish of Mongolian folk cuisine is scums. For cooking them milk is set boiling for a long period of time on small fire and then it is cooled. Afterwards a thick layer of scums is carefully laid out on a wooden plate, dried a bit and served up for tea.

Milk is subjected to long-term and complicated processing. At that at least three, and sometimes even five kinds of milk are used in equal proportions: that of cows, sheep, horses, camels and yaks. This diversity of milks in combination with a host of different leavens enlarges the range of Mongolian dairy cuisine to unimaginable limits.

Mongolian National Dishes

There are dishes in Mongolia that can be found only in this country, for example, borzog (pieces of finely cut dough, fried in grease or melted butter), khalmag (a mixture of scums and flour), patties with raw meat.