[Sca-cooks] mongolian meat cakes

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Sep 21, 2006, at 10:28 PM, Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:

>
> On Sep 21, 2006, at 9:09 PM, hlaislinn at earthlink.net wrote:
>
>> This dish was served at a winter event in my kingdom a few years
>> ago. I cannot make
>> any claims for its periodicity because all I have is a copy of what
>> was used in
>> the kitchen to make the dish. A Google search of "mongolian meat
>> cakes"
>> brought up nothing, so it must be from a book. I do remember it was
>> good and well-received.
>>
>> MONGOLIAN MEAT CAKES
>
> I have this book! Somewhere... Do I remember a title or author? Of
> course not! I'll look. I definitely remember the recipe, down to the
> cheese, which I found a little odd...

Update: Okay, I can't find the book, but it _might_ be "Wild  
Blackberry Cobbler And Other Old-Fashioned Recipes" by Katie Stewart  
and Pamela Michael (this is me ransacking titles with the word  
"blackberry" in them, at Amazon, for ones I recognize...).

I remember the cheese striking me as odd, but I remember a number of  
modern Chinese interpretations of Mongol cookery including fermented  
bean curd cubes, known variously under the names fu ngoy, fu yee, and  
others, depending on dialect. Basically it is bean curd cubes  
preserved and somewhat fermented in a salty, winy brine. It tastes  
kind of like limburger cheese, or really old brie. A close variant is  
what is known as "red bean curd", which I gather has some kind of  
reddish mold growing on it...

I'm wondering if this is somebody in the UK in the early 80's trying  
to approximate that flavor. I'm sure there were good Asian grocery  
stores in the larger cities in the UK, but probably not as many as now.

Adamantius