Feeding Genghis Khan - The Universal Ruler

Genghis Khan or Genghis Khan is one of the most notorious conquerors in world history but as he expanded his empire he also expanded his cuisine. So today we'll make zhou bier or little meat cakes, something the Khan would have eaten near the end of his life. You know when he was on top of the world. So thank you to HelloFresh for sponsoring this video as we cook for the Khan, this time on Tasting History. So this recipe comes from the Yinxiang Jiangyao by Hou Shouhui. It was written for the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire Buyantu Khan who also happened to be the fourth emperor of the Yuan Dynasty in China, and the book is the epitome of the great Asian empire that Genghis Khan created. It was written for a Mongol in Chinese by someone who was probably of Turkic descent, and it includes recipes from all over his empire and beyond, and this recipe for little meat cakes, not little but little like just a diminutive, includes ingredients also from all over his empire. Select mutton, tianjin. Remove the fat, membrane, and sinew. Mash into a paste with asafoetida, three tian. Black pepper, tu liang. Long pepper, wan liang. Finely ground coriander, wan liang. For ingredients use salt. Adjust flavors evenly. Use the fingers to make cakes, put into vegetable oil, and fry. So first I want to thank Roy Chan of the University of Oregon for helping me with the Chinese translations as well as the Chinese pronunciation. Now when it comes to the pronunciation of Genghis Khan or Genghis Khan there are actually multiple versions of the pronunciation depending on where you are and when you are. I am going to use Genghis Khan for the rest of the video simply because that is the most well-known pronunciation here in the US where I live. Now this recipe makes like a hundred cakes. It's absolutely huge so I am cutting it down, but what's cool is that for an old recipe it's really well written because it includes quantities for pretty much all of the ingredients which is very, very rare. So we really know what this probably tasted like but I am cutting it way, way back. So for this recipe what you'll need is one pound or 450 grams of ground lamb or mutton, a quarter teaspoon asafoetida powder. Now we've talked about asafoetida before on this show in the episode on Parthian chicken and it is a wonderfully complex but polarizing ingredient. It's a spice now used mostly in Indian cuisine and it was used a lot in ancient Rome, and it used to be called devil's dung. It does not smell good. It smells like rotten garlic, but once you cook it it still smells- it's more like burnt garlic or burnt onion after it's cooked but it just adds this really complex wonderful kind of umami flavor but you don't want much, and if you do buy it like seal it, put it in a plastic bag, and put that in a plastic bag because it'll make your whole kitchen smell. Two teaspoons of black pepper ground up, one teaspoon or about four long pepper ground up, one teaspoon coriander, one teaspoon salt, and enough vegetable oil to cover the bottom of a pan about three quarters of an inch to an inch. So the lamb is very Mongolian, the pepper very Chinese, and the asafoetida Indian, and the dish itself kind of reminds me of something that you'd find in a Turkish restaurant today. Thoroughly international and pretty darn easy to make just like the meals from today's sponsor HelloFresh. HelloFresh is just the thing for this holiday season because it saves a bunch of time. 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That's HelloFresh.com, code TASTINGHISTORY14, and now back to the little meat cakes. Take the ground lamb and add in the spices, and mix everything together with your hands. Oh, and don't forget the coriander. Once everything is well mixed, form the meat into little flat cakes about an inch and a half across. The recipe should make about 10 to 12, and I would make sure that they're fairly thin because when you put them in the oil they start to puff up, and if they're too thick then they just become meatballs which is also delicious, so do what you want. Then heat the oil in the pan until it gets to about 350 to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. That's 175 Celsius. Then carefully add the cakes to the pan, and leave them undisturbed for about two minutes, and it's okay if the oil doesn't completely submerge them, but it's also okay if it does. At two minutes flip them over, and let them fry for another one and a half minutes, or until they're a nice deep brown. Then take them out, and let them drain and cool while you fry up the rest of the cakes. Then make sure to hit the like button, and subscribe to Tasting History. Otherwise Genghis Khan might think you don't like his video, and that might make him upset, and you would not like Genghis when he's upset. Temujin, the boy who would grow up to be Genghis Khan, was born in northern Mongolia in the mid-12th century. The society he grew up in was one of nomads, always on the move trying to find fresh pastures for their sheep, goats, horses, and sometimes cattle, and because of this they relied mostly on these animals for the bulk of their diet. They got almost all of their vitamin C from sheep's milk, butter, and kurut, which was a type of curd that was then pressed between rocks to make a firm cheese, and when necessary or when they could spare them they would eat the animals for meat, but they also did a lot of hunting for things like bactrian camels, wolves, snow leopard, reindeer, bear, marmot, and game birds. When it came to drinking they enjoyed ayrag or kumis which is mare's milk that has been left to ferment, and before you turn up your nose at horse milk that's been fermented listen to what William of Rubruck a traveler from the 13th century had to say. Kumis that is mare's milk is moderately bitter. It bites the tongue like a harsh wine and after a person ceases to drink there remains a flavor of almond milk. It provides a great deal of internal human joy and it even intoxicates weak heads. It provides urine a great deal. Provides a great deal of internal human joy and provides urine? Well that gets my stamp of approval. Now young Temüjin started life out rather privileged the son of a great chief. Unfortunately when he was only 9 or 10 his father died poisoned while sharing a meal at a wedding by Tatars, a rival clan or tribe and one of the first that Genghis would go on to conquer, but before he could do that he had to step up and take his father's place as chief. It did not go well. His tribe basically said you're a boy, meh, and not only did they not accept him they left him, his mother, and his brothers out on the Asian steppe to languish. By the way I am embarrassed to admit that I was in college before I realized that the steppes of Asia didn't refer to a famous set of stairs. College. Anyway abandoned as they were for several years they subsisted on the small game that Temüjin and his brothers could catch while his mother went collecting the wild apples, and the bird cherries day and night she nourished their throats, digging up garden burnet and sinkfoil roots. Mother Ürgün's children nourished with wild garlic and wild onions managed to grow up to become Khans. To nourish their mother they went fishing with hooks for miserable fish, bending a fish hook from a needle. Not too glamorous but perhaps it was this lifestyle that forged him into the great man he would become. Terrible, yes. Now I won't go into the details of how Temüjin catcher of miserable fish turned into Genghis Khan universal ruler, that is what it means, but it took an army to get him there. One of the greatest military forces the world had ever seen and it's said that an army walks or in this case rides on its stomach but what is it that they were eating? Now for most of our information we have to rely on European and Chinese writers and mostly they were writing actually about Genghis Khan's sons and grandsons but we can definitely get a glimpse of what it was like to travel with a Mongolian horde. William of Ruburk says that they had cow's milk that they would boil down so much that it became like butter that required no salt to keep it fresh and they would keep it in sheep's stomachs perfect for a long trip. After they would make this they still had some buttermilk and they would boil that down and then dry it so that it is thereby made hard just like the slag of iron. In the winter they place this bitter coagulated milk which they call grut in a hide bag and pour on top hot water and they shake the bag strongly until the coagulated milk is dissolved. Yummy. Now when times were good they subsisted mostly on this milk and meat which typically they ate boiled. They didn't really eat much rice or grain because they thought that was fit for their slaves and the other captives that went around with them. Even when times weren't good rather than going the rice route they opted for meat. An emissary from the Pope who traveled with the Mongol army shortly after Genghis Khan died wrote about a time when the army under Genghis was starving. On that occasion they happened to find the fresh entrails of a beast. They took and cooked them discarding only the dung and bearing them before Genghis he ate the entrails with his men and from then on it was ordained by him that they should throw away neither blood nor entrails nor nothing else from a beast which they eat excepting the dung. He said they wouldn't even give bones to dogs until they had taken out all of the marrow first. Now this eating of every part of the animal including the blood was new under Genghis Khan. It had been forbidden before him but he codified it in his oral set of laws called yasa. Though he had specific rules on how these animals should be killed. It is forbidden to cut the throats of animals slain for food. When an animal is to be eaten its feet must be tied, its belly ripped open, and its heart squeezed in the hand until the animal dies. There's got to be a better way and if you didn't kill the animal this way then you were killed. So you better be really careful if you're about to go on a 10-day journey because Marco Polo says that during these long 10-day journeys where they would have very little rest they will sustain themselves on the blood of their horses, opening veins and letting the blood jet into their mouths, drinking till they have had enough and then staunching it. Now many of the accounts from foreign travelers have to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt not because they were out and out lies but because they were often confused about what they were seeing like Jean de Joiville in the 13th century. Now he did have an agenda to make the Mongols look uncivilized but in the case of steak tartare I don't think that was it. He said that the Mongols or in this case the Tatars would take steak or raw meat and put it under their saddles while they were riding and let it warm and then eat it raw. That's not what they were doing. They were most likely putting the steak on the horse to stop the horse from suffering from saddle sores. So grain of salt. But even so pretty much all of the writers both European, Arabic, and Chinese agreed that the manners of the Mongols left something to be desired. When grease from meat would drip down their hands and arms they would wipe them on their boots, and then if they did want to wash their hands they would wash it in the water that the meat had been cooked in and basically let the water go back into the pot, and it's kind of odd because in other instances they were rather fastidious about their water and keeping it clean. As part of their religion you couldn't spit water back into water. That was against the rules but I guess meat water not a problem. And like I said they were all about that meat. They like horse meat more than any other meat. They even eat rats, and dogs, and dine on cats with great pleasure. They drink wine whenever they want it. They get drunk every day on kumis, and when they celebrate holidays and the festivals of their forefathers they spend their time in singing, or rather shrieking, and in drinking bouts continuously for six days. They eat human meat like lions devouring it roasted on the fire and soaked with grease. When they take someone hostile to themselves they come together in one place to eat him in vengeance. They avidly suck his blood just like hellish vampires. Now we talked about what young Genghis would have eaten, and what he would have eaten with the army maybe as he conquered his way across Asia, but what then? What happens to a man's palate when you've conquered from the Caucasus to China? It's gotta evolve. And by the end of his reign and definitely that of his children food and manners had evolved as they poured in from all parts of Asia. Noodles and bread from China, spices from the Middle East and India, and even France pitched in to this new Pax Mongolica. It was the Parisian goldsmith Guillaume Boucher who designed a remarkable drinking fountain for the Khan's grandson Mongke Khan. It was described as a great silver tree at the roots of which are four silver lions, each having a channel spurting out white mare's milk, and four pipes lead up to the summit of the tree, and over each of them is a gilded serpent, the tails of which envelop the trunk of the tree. And from one of these pipes pours forth wine, from another karakumis, from another boal that is a honey drink, and from another rice beer. At the very top Master Guillaume has made an angel holding a trumpet. From horse blood to this in about 20 years. Pretty impressive. Now that second drink the karakumis it means black kumis, and it was clarified mare's milk. It was the fermented mare's milk that had been clarified by laboriously taking out all of the milk solids, making it clear not black. It was called black because it came from the black mare, and it was prized amongst the Khans, and may have been one of the things that led to Genghis Khan's son's death. See Olgedai Khan had a drinking problem and he knew it. In fact he had one of his officials monitor his alcohol intake. He was supposed to cut down on the number of cups that he drank each day by half, and he did that by making cups that were twice as big as normal cups, and so he died of probably alcohol poisoning. But by his time these cups and really all of the Khan's food would be served not by servants or slaves but by nobles, and their mouths are covered likewise their nostrils with beautiful napkins of gold and silk in order that their breath nor their odor enters neither into the food nor into the beverages of the great lord. Well I think that's very refined and frankly I would not mind if that type of service made a comeback. Now it's from this more refined Mongol court that we start to get recipes coming in from all over the empire. Recipes like our little meat cakes, and here we are. Zorpir or little meat cakes of the Mongol Empire. They smell great. They look good. A little more dense than what we might typically think of today because usually if we made something like this we would put bread crumbs or something in there. This doesn't have it. It's just the meat and the spices but it looks good. Let's give it a shot. That asafoetida is there. It really does not take much. Right off the bat it's like zing this weird flavor on your palate. Not in a bad way, it's just something that we are not used to at least in western cooking, and then you start to get the other spices in there. You know we know pepper, we know coriander and everything but that spice very, very different. I like lamb. Lamb for me sometimes can be a little bit chewy. These are maybe a little bit chewy. I think that beef would be even better but they're good. I could be a Khan. I could be a Mongol Khan. Now Genghis Khan was alleged to have said after us the descendants of our clan will wear gold embroidered garments, eat rich and sweet foods, ride fine horses, and embrace beautiful women but they will not say that they owe all this to their fathers and elder brothers, and they will forget us and those great times. And he was right about the grandeur. The Mongol court over the next century became really splendid but he was definitely wrong about being forgotten because who doesn't know the name Genghis Khan. So thank you again to HelloFresh. Make sure to follow me on Instagram Tasting History with Max Miller and I will see you next time on Tasting History.