Manti Period COrigin theory CVerified

Manti are little parcels of ground lamb wrapped in thin sheets of rolled wheat dough, boiled (steamed in some regions) and dressed with a yogurt sauce. Both the wheat for the wrappers and the lamb for the filling had long been close at hand across Anatolia.

One view holds that the dish began with the food of the Turkic and Mongol peoples of Central Asia, then traveled west and took root in Anatolia. The food historian Özge Samancı allows that its roots may lie in Chinese cooking, and sees it growing up in the Turkic and Mongol world of Central Asia before it began reaching Anatolia with the westward migration of the Oghuz (Turkmen) tribes from the eleventh century onward. Other accounts have Turkic and Mongol peoples carrying it along the Silk Road. The Yinshan Zhengyao, a dietary treatise presented to the Yuan court in 1330 by the court dietitian Hu Sihui, records steamed parcels it calls mantou (饅頭): a filling of lamb, lamb fat, scallion, ginger and dried tangerine peel, all finely chopped, wrapped and steamed. Some see these as dishes connected to the Turkic manti.

On the Ottoman side to the west, the oldest record in an Ottoman cookbook is a fifteenth-century work by Sirvani, where manti appears as a steamed dumpling of ground lamb with chickpeas and cinnamon. The present-day form, boiled and served with yogurt, appears in a cookbook of 1844, as a dish called Tatar boregi. The name manti is found widely across Central Asia, and some hold that it shares a root with the Chinese mantou.

Accounts differ over where manti first appeared. One has it born in the Middle East and carried east along the Silk Road to China and Korea. In Ottoman cookbooks, the oldest record of manti is the fifteenth-century cookbook by Sirvani.

Earlier still, the Yinshan Zhengyao, a dietary treatise presented to the Yuan court in 1330, lists several kinds of mantou in its first volume: parcels of lamb filling, wrapped and steamed. Dishes of this kind, then, were already being made at the Mongol-era court in the east. Some see them as connected to the Turkic manti. The text itself, though, calls them mantou, and whether they are the same dish as manti cannot be told from this passage alone. And the Sirvani cookbook, said to be the oldest Ottoman cookbook to record manti, turns out, when traced back, to be a translation of a thirteenth-century Abbasid cookbook written in Arabic; its manti entry is absent from that thirteenth-century original and was added by Sirvani himself. The dish is seen as belonging less to the Arab cooking of the Middle East than to the side of Asia Minor.

No independent source has turned up to support a Middle Eastern birth spreading eastward. The view that the dish traveled west out of Central Asia sits better with the name and with the accounts of food historians. But that is what it rests on; it does not follow the route west through records of the time, so it is not yet a settled answer either. When the present Anatolian form (boiled and dressed with yogurt) took hold, and how far the Central Asian and Turkish versions should be counted as separate dishes, are not known.