[Sca-cooks] Any period Mongolian recipes out there?

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Fri Aug 24 04:19:23 PDT 2007


On Aug 23, 2007, at 11:46 PM, KristiWhyKelly at aol.com wrote:

> Help,
>
> My menu need some serious tweaking, and I've been asked to include  
> period
> 'Eastern' recipes, specifically rice or noodle dishes.
>
> My only source for that region was _A soup for the Qan_ which is  
> apparently
> all wrong for the location, which is Mongolian.
>
> Any ideas for sources or dishes?  I'm pretty desperate now.

I'm a little confused between your subject line and the actual  
question... am I right in thinking you're looking for non-Mongolian  
Asian dishes? If so, "A Soup for the Qan" might easily apply to much  
of Yuan Dynasty China (probably not the far south or east, places now  
known as, say Quangdong or Shanghai, but then China is a big place).

Please note that rice or noodle dishes might not be found quite where  
we might expect them, looking from a modern perspective, since  
availability by trade of various items might not have been in period  
what it is today. So, for example, there are probably not too many  
Mongolian rice dishes: where would they get it and why would they  
carry it? Similarly, in the south of China, you're probably less  
likely to find wheat noodle recipes than you are those for, say, some  
version of cellophane or bean starch noodles.

There are a few noodle references in Ni Tsan's Cloud Forest Hall  
Collection of Rules for Eating And Drinking, which, as I recall, is  
from 14th-century East central China. There's a pretty  
straightforward recipe for wheat noodles, which it then directs you  
to serve in broth or sauce, one for cold stirred noodles in a fish or  
shrimp, soy and vinegar sauce, one for gluten noodles in what to me  
looks like a pretty complex sauce with lots of ingredients ;-), and a  
reference to using cellophane noodles as a substrate for steaming  
crabmeat; the noodles are removed when the dish is cool, and  
presumably discarded.

In the same source there are enough rice references to suggest the  
author and any potential readers were familiar with rice, but not  
many recipes that aren't for rice wine: it refers to rice porridge  
and suggests one recipe as a condiment/topping; presumably there were  
other toppings, just as there are today. There are also a couple of  
filled wheat bun, bread/pancake-type items, and wontons.

Adamantius


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