Mare's milk and a soup for the Qan

Mongolian herders still divide their food into two kinds. White foods are the products of milk, eaten mostly in summer and autumn when the animals are giving it. Red foods are meat, eaten mostly in winter, when the milk has dried up and the cold keeps a carcass fresh. The division is old, and the friars of the 1240s and 1250s describe the same year.

Summer was the milk season. The mares foaled in spring, and from early summer they were milked several times a day while their foals were tied on a line nearby, so that they let their milk down. The milk was poured into a large leather bag and churned with a heavy wooden plunger, sometimes for hours, until it fermented and soured into kumis, the airag of modern Mongolia. Rubruck describes the whole process, and his account is quoted at the foot of the page. It was mildly alcoholic, fizzy, sour and nourishing, and herders still drink it by the litre in summer.

The other milks, from cows, yaks, sheep, goats and camels, went into a range of products. Cream, butter, a soft cheese, yoghurt. Above all a dried curd, which Rubruck calls grut, the modern aaruul. Sour milk was boiled until the curd separated, and the curd was pressed and dried in the sun until it was, in his phrase, as hard as iron slag. It kept for months. In winter it was dissolved in water and drunk.

Winter meat was mutton above all, with goat, beef and in hard times horse. The Mongols wasted nothing. An animal that died was cut into strips and dried in the wind without salt, and Rubruck noticed that they did not like to drink plain water.

This was not a diet of plenty. It worked as long as the herds were healthy, and a bad winter, the dzud, when snow or ice covered the grass, could kill animals by the hundred thousand. Spring, before the new milk, was the hungry season.

The Secret History, the Mongols’ own account of Chinggis Khan’s rise, opens with hunger. After his father was poisoned, his mother Hoelun and her children were abandoned by their clan, and the text says she fed them on wild pears, roots, wild onion and garlic, and the boys fished and snared marmots. That poverty is told on the page on the world he grew up in, and the memory of it ran through the empire’s ideology.

Hunting supplied the rest. The great ring hunts in autumn, when an army surrounded a whole district and drove the game inward, were military training and also a way to lay in meat for winter. Marmots, gazelles, deer, wild asses and birds all went into the pot.

The herders did eat grain when they could get it. Rubruck says the great lords had villages in the south from which millet and flour were brought for the winter, and that poorer families traded sheep and furs for them. That dependence on the farming world is one of the oldest facts in steppe history. A nomad could live without grain. He lived better with it, and whoever controlled the trade at the edge of the steppe had leverage.

The Mongol armies became famous for how little they needed. Each soldier rode with several horses and lived off his herds. Marco Polo, writing from what he heard at Qubilai’s court, says a Mongol force could ride for ten days without lighting a fire, living on dried milk paste mixed with water in a flask and shaken as they rode, and when they had to, on blood let from a vein in the horse’s neck.

The dried milk is certainly true. The blood is plausible, since herders across the steppe did it in emergencies, and it frightened Europeans more than anything else in the reports. John of Plano Carpini, who reached the court of Guyuk in 1246, wrote that they would eat anything at all, dogs, wolves, foxes, horses and rats among it, and in extremity human flesh. The last charge was a commonplace of the time about every enemy, and nothing in the Mongols’ own sources supports it.

At court the steppe diet became ceremony. Every assembly of princes, every enthronement and every reception of envoys was a feast, and the drinking had rules. Who sat where, who was offered the cup first, who was served the choicest cut of mutton, all marked rank. To refuse a cup offered by the khan was an insult.

The amounts were large. Rubruck saw Batu’s camp supplied daily with the milk of three thousand mares. At Karakorum the Paris goldsmith William Buchier built a silver tree for Mongke whose pipes poured wine, kumis, rice wine and honey mead into basins at its foot, and that tree is described on the page on the capital.

Alcohol killed a remarkable number of the dynasty. Ogedei, Chinggis Khan’s successor, was a famous drinker. The Persian historians say his brother Chaghatai set an officer over him to limit the number of cups he drank each day, and that Ogedei obeyed and had a larger cup made. He died in December 1241 after a night of drinking, and he was not the only member of the dynasty whose death the sources put down to drink.

The steppe had its own rules about slaughter, and they collided with Islamic law. A Mongol killed a sheep by cutting a small opening in its chest, reaching in and stopping the heart, so that the blood stayed in the body and none was spilled on the ground. Spilling blood on the earth was offensive to the spirits of the land. Islamic and Jewish law required the opposite, a cut across the throat that drained the blood.

For decades the two lived side by side. Then, according to Rashid al-Din, a group of Muslim merchants at Qubilai’s court refused to eat the meat he offered them, because it had not been killed in their way. Qubilai took it as an insult. In 1280 he issued an edict forbidding Muslims to slaughter by cutting the throat, on pain of death, and the ban was extended to circumcision. It lasted about seven years and did real harm to Muslim trade before it was quietly lifted, because the empire needed those merchants more than it needed the rule.

The episode shows how much a meal carried at the Mongol court. Accepting food from the khan was accepting his authority. Refusing it, for any reason, was politics.

The other kitchen is recorded in a book. In 1330 Hu Sihui, a dietary physician at the Yuan court, presented the emperor Tugh Temur with the Yinshan Zhengyao, Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink. Paul Buell and Eugene Anderson translated it as A Soup for the Qan, and it is the best single source for what the Mongol rulers of China ate.

The first section gives ninety-five recipes for special dishes, and it is mutton almost from start to finish. Mutton soups thickened with chickpeas, which the Chinese called Muslim beans. Mutton with noodles, mutton with barley, sheep’s head, sheep’s tail, tripe. Several dishes carry Mongol, Turkic, Persian or Arabic names, written out in Chinese characters.

The seasonings show the empire. Fenugreek, cumin, saffron, asafoetida, black pepper, cinnamon, mastic and rose water stand beside Chinese ginger and tangerine peel. Many ingredients reached Beijing along the routes the Mongols controlled, and the dishes are the food of the Muslim and Central Asian officials and merchants who ran much of the Yuan administration.

The book is not a cookbook in the modern sense. Hu Sihui was a physician, and the work is a dietary manual in the Chinese tradition. Every food is listed with its nature and its effect, warming or cooling, what it strengthens and what it cures, and later sections give the medicinal properties of hundreds of grains, meats, fruits and vegetables. It includes one of the earliest Chinese descriptions of distilled liquor, arak, a drink the Mongol court had taken up from the west.

The Mongol empire was a machine for moving things, and food went with everything else. Thomas Allsen’s Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia follows the traffic.

A Christian from Samarkand called Mar Sargis was summoned to Qubilai’s court in 1268 because his family were makers of sharbat, the sweetened fruit syrup of the Islamic world. He was given an official post and the job of supplying the palace with forty jars of it a year, and he ended his career as an administrator in Zhenjiang. In the other direction, Rashid al-Din, the vizier of the Mongol rulers of Iran, wrote about Chinese plants and crops and had seeds brought west to his estates.

Some things travelled less than legend says. Marco Polo did not bring pasta to Italy, which had it already. But noodles, dumplings and the cooking of the Central Asian Muslims did spread through the Mongol world, and the court food of the Yuan left marks on the cooking of northern China that outlasted the dynasty. The Ming emperors who threw the Mongols out in 1368 had the Yinshan Zhengyao reprinted in 1456.

On the steppe itself, almost nothing changed. When the empire broke up, its people went back to the year of white foods and red foods, and herders in Mongolia today churn their airag in a leather bag much as Rubruck saw it done.