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!