[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
More information about the Sca-cooks
mailing list