At the market: Юу вэ? What is it?

I think it's about time for a blogpost. Yes, it's been a while. Let's reconnect. And I think I'll reboot with something easy (food). Marriage, the education system, social class, infrastructure and city planning--I'll get to those later.

Yesterday I bought a small jar of salted chives called homuul (хөмүүл) at the "Green Days of Fall" harvest festival. In its 8th year, this green market festival takes place for about a week when it starts to get cool. This year, it's located at the new Dunjingarav trade center, a bright orange building on the southern edge of the UB city center. [I suspect this center will be quite popular in the winter, as it's all indoors: like Bombughur in variety (clothes, cosmetics, appliances, etc.), but the size of Narantuul (an outdoor market, the largest in Mongolia).]

The market operates in the same way as the daily government-supported summer green markets in the city: farmers from the countryside bring their fresh produce into the city and sell it directly to the buyers, getting a better price for their fruits and veg than if they were to sell to a middle-man. The sellers and their products are also supposedly checked out by the government as authentically local and Mongolian-grown (hard to come by, as many of the fruits and vegetables come from China). As a customer, I like knowing that I'm supporting the everyday Mongolian, that the vegetables are almost organic, and you can even find potatoes that go for 300 tugrik a kilo (that's like less than 20 cents a kilo, folks. WTF?!).

I've seen and overlooked many of the canned goods at the green markets around UB, because, well they're canned. But my Mongolian market companion successfully convinced me yesterday to get this particular variety: homuul/хөмүүл is grown in the Gobi desert, he said, and has numerous health benefits, like preventing cancer. He said he himself keeps a big jar in his fridge over the winter, and throws it into anything savory. Gobi? Oooh, okay. And then I took a whiff of it: onion-y! I was sold. I could already imagine it in a hot breakfast omelette.

*It only took opening the jar to convince me to buy this--the onion-y smell just wafts out!

So I went home and did some internet research. The horticultural name for homuul/хөмүүл is allium mongolicum. It is indeed from the Gobi desert and grows in dry, sandy, and gravelly soils. Like many Mongolian florae, it has a very short harvesting period, which I think is probably why it is salted when it's put in jars for sale. The one that I bought was roughly chopped, but also available were jars of minced or mashed homuul/хөмүүл for use in bohtz/бууз (steamed meat dumpling) or hoshuur/хуушуур (fried meat dumpling, like an empanada). Apparently, in the desert, in addition to the essential milky tea, homuul bohtz is a typical way to greet visitors and extend hospitality.

*Picture of homuul/хөмүүл in its natural habitat, from a German survey

Homuul is one of those very local things you can only find in markets and never in a grocery store. Also included in that list are berries (the huge variety of berries), certain roots, rhubarb, and wide white mushrooms. On our way back from the Chinggis Khaan statue a few weeks ago, we were met with numerous locals on the side of the road with their arms thrust out, holding plastic bags filled with large white-capped mushrooms. Mushrooms are hard to find in the markets, and they're usually of the imported shiitake variety. Mongolia does have mushrooms, I thought, and they're big and beautiful!!! I wanted to pull over and buy a bag, but regretfully didn't. Back in UB, they could hardly be found. One of the other Fulbrighters did manage to find someone selling them, but it was outside the market and not inside. (For the record, those steppe mushrooms are really rich with mushroom-y flavor!)

It made me wonder why more unique, native species of fruits and vegetables aren't cultivated as much as say, potatoes, cabbage, beets, and cucumbers. During the summer you can find bins of different types of berries, and it seems that the variety offered changes every 2 weeks depending on what's in season. There are so many types and they're so unique I don't even think there are definitive English names for them. For example, ners/нэрс is my absolute favorite berry: they're super juicy, the pits are small and edible, and unlike many of the other berries, it's sweet enough to eat straight without honey. They most commonly call it blueberry here, but it is most certainly not blueberry! Bolor-toli Mongolian-English online dictionary comes up with the following translations for ners/нэрс: bilberry, blueberry, whimberry, whortberry, great bilberry, huckleberry, swamp blueberry, whortleberry. I would say the wikipedia for swamp whortleberry matches what I have in my fridge the most. Ans (аньс) is another commonly known berry. But it's even hard for some Mongolians to name them all. Although they're bountiful and absolutely delicious, these berries can't be found bagged and labeled at a grocery store, and they're only occasionally scratched on cardboard signs at the markets. Knowledge of them by non-locals can only be had by experimentation or through a savvy translator.

*Berries at Narantuul

An exception to all this would be sea buckthorn--there's been a huge push to promote sea buckthorn and sea buckthorn products. They're abundant here, and their reported health benefits are vast. Mongolians are proud to share the orange berry with the world, labeling the products not only in English but in other Asian languages as well. On the main street going west a couple of weeks ago, there were poster ads every block promoting the 100 brand of sea buckthorn juice. At the State Department store, they were giving out samples. On the shelves of even smaller grocery stores you can find a few varieties of sea buckthorn concentrates--sweetened and unsweetened. There are several types of sea buckthorn wine. And then sea buckthorn candies. I've seen sea buckthorn oil sold at Mercury Market. To my amazement at the Dunjingarav market, they were even selling the sea buckthorn saplings (male and female). Ners/нэрс and ans/аньс products exist, but in lesser and less common quantities. (What I would to have some нэрс wine!)

*Fulbright researcher Aleah is pretty pleased to find sea buckthorn berries for the first time. These berries, from a few weeks ago, are a different variety than the more plump sea buckthorn berries that are in season now.

                                                                                                                          

Rhubarb, having originated from Mongolian mountainsides, is also conspicuously absent from the shelves and roadside stands. It flourishes on the mountains surrounding Ulaanbaatar city, and even as a weed in the Turkish Embassy garden off the main strip. We were ecstatic to find so many of the red stalks on our hike from Zuun mod/Зүүн мод a few weekends ago.

*My hiking comrades later made a kind of jam with the rhubarb we collected. Warning--apparently green rhubarb tastes like onion! Pick only the reddest you can find.

So it was strange to be in this metropolitan city and not see any rhubarb being sold anywhere, not even outside the markets. This may be because rhubarb in this part of the world has not been viewed to have any culinary value, but rather medicinal value. The leaves are toxic, but apparently Mongolians will chew the raw stalks as a laxative and to treat other digestive ailments. It wasn't until it traveled down the Silk Road to Europe that it began to be used widely as a pie-filler and strawberry complement like it is commonly used today. So my western self can't help but think how the Mongolian food industry could benefit from exporting wild, organic rhubarb.

There seems to be at least a little bit of technical curiosity, though, about the benefits of some of these plants and if cultivation is a worthwhile pursuit. Much of the English language literature online on homuul/хөмүүл, for example, asks questions with nutritional (content and fat metabolism), ethnobotanical (here and here), and seemingly agricultural (soil, spacing, community and climate) contexts. Most of these studies are done by Inner Mongolian researchers in collaboration with and with funding by Chinese research groups. There's also an excellent German project online that aims to document all the flora in Mongolia, which is terrific, but difficult for the layperson to use for practical purposes.

There are so many plants and wildflowers and fruits and vegetables that I would love to identify, but it's difficult even with Mongolian friends translating, to figure out what they are. I went on a hike last weekend with my Mongolian co-workers, and I asked what some of the wildflowers on the mountain were. They had no idea what they were called, even in Mongolian. And then I thought, well, you'd have to be a trained naturalist or very good hobbyist to be able to tell what all the plants are in the woods of Virginia suburbia, even.

*A beautiful view from the mountains surrounding the ger camp the Otgontenger University staff (we)retreated to last weekend. More mountain flora to follow in future posts.

So investigations on identifying the various plants and native edibles of Mongolia continues! We encountered my latest puzzle today on a visit back to the fall harvest market. An elderly woman was selling ankle bone belts, homuul/хөмүүл, and small bags of an unidentified raw vegetable cut into 3- 4-inch stalks. They resembled some kind of stringy root vegetable, mostly white but speckled with pink-brown bits. It reminded me of taro, but more narrow and earthy. Our weak Mongolian understanding gleaned that it was meant to be eaten raw, and not cooked, and that it's good for the stomach. I thought it might be a kind of sugar cane, but she shook her head. She finally opened up a bag and broke off a small piece for us to taste (it broke off pretty easily, like a half-cooked potato), and it tasted like a very unripe banana, quite stringent. What could it be?! She said something that sounded like hatan/хатан, or queen in English, so my best lead right now is that it's Queen Anne's Lace root / wild carrot. The curiosity lingers for this English-speaking eater!