Mongolia is Awesome: Mare's Milk and Meat, Meat, Meat

When traveling to exotic locales, the food is often part of the appeal. People want to eat at authentic restaurants and savor the spices of India or the cheeses of France or the genuine, cilantro-free molé of Mexico. As for Mongolia… Well, I get a lot of sympathy from people over the food. People want to know, how awful is it? Have you eaten rancid yak butter? Fermented mare’s milk? Wouldn’t you kill for a burger? And I myself was concerned about having to eat sheep shoulder and brain or whatever. In UB, the food is generally average—There’s mediocre foreign food (i.e. cheeseburgers, pastas, sandwiches) and mediocre Mongolian food (tasteless dumplings or mutton soup). But after spending a week in the countryside, eating real actual Mongolian food, I am categorizing my Food post under “Mongolia is Awesome.” So let me explain why. 

Firstly, I want to say that with the exception of the first day of my trek from UB, I was never hungry on my trip. While actually in Darkhad, I had not a single hunger pang, nor even a feeling, “I’d like to eat now.” The reason for this is threefold: Mongolian hospitality, milk tea, and the nature of Mongolian food. Mongolians are known (at least by those who know about Mongolia) for their hospitality; they have a sort of “open door” policy on visitors, meaning that in the countryside, you can just stop by a ger and be welcomed as a guest. They’ll provide tea, food at meal times, and you can pitch your tent outside their ger. So pretty much any time maybe I might have been hungry soon, I was being offered a bowl of soup and a cup of tea. And when I say, “They’ll provide tea,” I really mean it. The first thing that any Mongolian does when you arrive in her home is pull up a stool for you (or gesture to the bed/couch) and pour you a cup of tea. It’s as necessary a rule as asking if a guest wants a drink in the States, except here it’s performed with absolute consistency.  So, visiting 3-5 gers a day, I drank a lot of tea. The other thing about Mongolian hospitality is that you’re required to accept. It’s rude not to take any of what’s offered, though you can take just a small amount, if you like. When someone offers you vodka, you at least take a sip; when someone offers you snuff, you sniff the top of the bottle if you don’t want any. So when a nomad offered me tea, I had to accept. Although theoretically I probably only had to take a sip, the American in me still found taking only a sip and not finishing to be ruder than not accepting at all, I guess. So I drank every single cup of milk tea. Even if I hadn’t been eating a lot, I imagine the constant supply of milk tea would have kept me from getting too hungry. And the final reason for my lack of hunger is that the food is always filling. Apart from being offered a lot of it, it is all dairy, meat, and flour based, which I assure you kept me very satisfied. A cup of milk tea and a khuushuur (meat wrapped in a flour shell and then fried in oil) is pretty filling. And three cups of tea (from three gers) and three khuushuurs (because they are so damn good) is beyond filling.

So what exactly did I eat in Darkhad? To be honest, I’m not 100% sure. The meat and dairy products they served me were generally pretty ambiguous. Prof C told me on the first day in Darkhad that I was eating beef, but at some point in the week, they pulled out an animal’s leg that was definitely not cow—goat, I think, or sheep. And for our journey back, we ate some neck meat that came from a bone that did not look bovine sized. (Note: I do not recommend neck meat.) And though I ate a lot of cream, the family milked both cows and yaks, so I’m not sure which it came from. (Actually, I didn’t notice them keeping the milks separate, and they always referred to both cows and yaks as “ukhur,” so I probably had a mixture of both.) So I can’t give many details as to the type of meat/milk I was eating, but I will say this: It was delicious. A diet based in meat and dairy and bread is my kind of diet. ( I do confess, though, that the lack of fruits and vegetables—or should I say, the absence of fruits and vegetables in Darkhad—really got to me. It may not be an exaggeration to say that no one has ever been as excited about pickled carrots, peppers, and cucumbers as when I was offered vegetable preserves in Ulaan Uul.) At our family’s home, we ate a lot of noodle soup with bits of meat, and one night I had just noodles mixed up with meat. Though everyone else added milk tea to theirs to make it more soupy, I loved it just as it was, and I ate two bowls of it. I had fried fish (with just the right amount of pepper ) out of a paper sleeve (from my notebook) and both meat and fish khuushuurs. While still on the drive up, we stopped by a ger for wild strawberries and cream on bread, and in Ulaan Uul, I had beef ripped straight from the bone. The most glorious food of all, though, was breakfast. Every morning I got homemade bread (with such a delicious crust) topped with some substance that was half-cream, half-butter (it reminded me of clotted cream, actually), and loads of sugar. It was amazing. Although at times I felt like maybe bread, sugar, and cream wasn’t the healthiest start to the day, I figured it’s not much worse than American breakfast cereals, and at least mine was real sugar and not corn syrup, and fresh full cream instead of the ultra-pasteurized half-water skimmed milk parents sometimes make their kids have.

And that might be the secret to Mongolian country food: It’s fresh. I got to see the family milking the cows (and even helped a tiny bit myself!), and then I got to eat that delicious milk the next morning. We bought tiny (non-GMO!) wild strawberries from kids who’d just picked them on the mountain, and we ate them by the handful. One special treat was sitting by Tsaagan Nuur (White Lake, named for the whitefish in abundance there), watching some boys pull fish out of their nets, standing by while they scaled and gutted them on the banks, and getting to eat those fish for lunch. There is nothing quite like fresh fish, and from lake to plate in less than an hour is about as fresh as it gets. (Lake-to-plate is just an analogy, though—there were no plates.) Most people in the countryside didn’t have a refrigerator, so food had to be consumed that day. If there was extra, it had to be eaten before any new food was made. And most of it was made from scratch. Though the herder families don’t grind the grain themselves, they do raise the animals whose milk and meat they eat, and they make all their bread, dumplings, noodles, etc. themselves. In the afternoons, the girls would be kneading bread dough or rolling out flour dough and cutting it into noodles, and in the mornings, the mother of the family pulled bread out of the pan and cut it into slices for us. Simple food made by hand from a farm’s own resources can be a million times better than refrigerated, cleansed, chemistried, packaged products sent from miles away. And back-to-the-basics is just so delicious. I don’t care what the gastrochefs say: Wild strawberries with fresh cream on newly baked bread… to me, that’s gourmet.


That all being said, I did have a few culinary adventures, not all of them good. The milk tea (often with salt, thus described as “salty milk tea”) took getting used to. The first few times I drank it, I literally had to hide my gagging, but now I can drink two cups at a time, though I don’t see why I would. (A note: It is often served scaldingly hot, so I used to have to wait a while before I could start on it, and even so my tongue was permanently burnt. Prof C, however, explained that you’re supposed to slurp at hot tea. The very idea of slurping was repulsive to me at first, but I have to say, it works. That may have been the hardest thing for me to get used to --even harder than sleeping on the floor, wearing clothes for 5 days straight, and Mongolian toilets-- getting over years of stringent manners education and learning how to slurp up my tea.) For a final adventure, though I had managed not to encounter all the really nasty bits of animals in Darkhad, on the way back I ended up having to try some. We stopped in Moron to sleep and for Prof C to meet up with some friends, and we stayed in his friend’s guesthouse. For lunch, a woman brought in a huge bowl filled with something that smelled kind of inedible. I looked into the bowl, and there was some sort of a head. It was sheep-sized, but it had a weird brown skin stretched over it, so it didn’t have eyes or ears or anything. The only thing that identified it as a head (besides its general shape) was a twisted black and red tongue sticking out of a gaping maw near the bottom of the shape. I was thinking, “Oh my God, I cannot eat that,” and my face probably expressed as much. Everyone else dove into it, while I sat and hid in my guidebook. At one point, though, Prof C pointed to the bowl of meat he’d just been tearing from the jawbone and said, “Alice, please, take.” And there’s that damned Mongolian rule of unrefusal. So I reached out and took a piece that looked more like meat and less like gums than the rest; it was fine, and I nodded and retreated back to my book, my duties done. Or so I thought. A minute later, Prof C picked up some gel-like snowy white bit. “Alice, eat this. It is sheep’s tail; it is very good. It is not like fat—it is like cream.” I had to assent, and he cut off a piece and handed it to me. I bit at a tiny bit. It was mostly like fat. Or, it was like eating a slimy gummy bear that tasted like sheep. As I gnawed away, Prof C explained that in Mongolia, they give babies sheep tail to suck on instead of pacifiers. So I was basically eating a nomad binky. I ate it all off the bit of hairy skin still attached, put the skin down, and thankfully I was not offered more. In fact, Prof C seemed to take pity on me and told a girl to give me some khuushuurs she was preparing.

And, in case anyone was wondering, I did get to try airag, Mongolian fermented mare’s milk! Airag is a Central Asian quirk that is just repulsive enough to get a lot of attention, as in this article. Wikitravel describes the taste as ranging "from bile-like to a mixture of lemonade and sour cream.” So although I was apprehensive, it’s actually really good for you, and it’s very Mongolian, so I wanted to try some. Luckily, I got my chance pretty soon into the countryside. On our first day trekking, we stopped to lend a wrench to a stranded family. When they’d finished with it, they offered us some mare’s milk. As he poured it into a bowl for us, Prof C told us that we should only drink a little because it was our first time. (Fermented milk products tend to cause stomach upset upon first consumption.)  Nervous about the gastrointestinal repercussions, I only had a small sip. And I have surprising news… It was fine! Maybe that says something about my taste, but I actually could have drunk a whole cup, and maybe later this trip, I will. It tasted somewhat familiar; Prof C suggested like yogurt, which is possible, though I despise yogurt. Later I realized that it might remind me of the aftertaste of Old Rosie cider, my favorite cider at the Turf Tavern at Oxford. Most people dislike or sort of hate Old Rosie (one man described it as just “quaffable”), and though I didn’t like the aftertaste, I didn’t mind it because I like the cider as a whole better than Strongbow’s. So I guess that got me used to the aftertaste, and now I can drink airag like a pro (or at least, not like an American). But I have to say, I do worry if the cider I was drinking for 6 months had an aftertaste like fermented mare’s milk…