Buuz Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Buuz is a Mongolian steamed dumpling, made by wrapping a filling of minced mutton in a wheat-flour skin and steaming it. Bitten into, each parcel releases its collected juices, and it takes pride of place at the feast of Tsagaan Sar, the Mongolian New Year, and at the family table.

The wheat of the skin and the mutton of the filling are both staples long rooted in the Eurasian interior, close at hand in the everyday life of the herders. Grinding the wheat into flour, wrapping minced mutton in that skin, and steaming it: once this handwork came together, buuz took its shape.

The steamed-dumpling technique and the mutton filling settled into Mongolia across two eras. The first was the Yuan dynasty (the reign of Kublai, thirteenth to fourteenth centuries), when Mongol pastoral cooking mingled with that of China. The second was the Qing period (from the seventeenth century onward), when trade with China widened and the dish reached ordinary tables. Already at the Yuan court, chopped mutton was mixed with mutton fat, scallion, tangerine peel, ginger, and other ingredients into a filling and wrapped in a wheat-flour skin, and some of these parcels were steamed.

The name buuz itself tells the story of where the dish comes from. It is held to descend from the Chinese baozi, carried into Mongolia together with the steamed-dumpling technique. The names that share this root — buuz, mantu, mandu, and the rest — are spread across a region that roughly matches the old extent of the Mongol Empire. The chain of names and the overlap of their distribution trace out the road the dish traveled. That said, no linguistic study has yet worked out how buuz shifted in sound from baozi, so the etymology rests for now on the agreement of several reference works rather than on scholarship.

A clue comes from a single book from the imperial kitchen. The Yinshan Zhengyao (1330), a dietary manual of the Yuan court compiled by Hu Sihui, lists in its first volume several dishes in which a filling of chopped mutton, mutton fat, sheep's-tail fat, scallion, and other ingredients is wrapped in a wheat-flour skin. One of them, shiluo jiao'er, is filled with mutton, mutton fat, sheep's-tail fat, scallion, tangerine peel, and ginger, all finely chopped; the vegetable is scallion, not the onion that often goes into buuz today. Another, tianhua baozi, which carries the word baozi in its name, adds mushrooms to a similar filling, wraps it in a thin skin of white wheat flour, and steams it. Mutton wrapped in a wheat skin and steamed was being made in the Yuan court kitchen by 1330 at the latest. Whether these dishes had the same form as today's buuz, or were its direct ancestor, the book itself does not say.

Buuz did not arise in isolation. The same idea — minced meat wrapped in a wheat skin and steamed — runs on to the manti of Central Asia, the mandu of Korea, the momo of Tibet and Nepal, and the baozi of China. These share the Chinese baozi as a common ancestral form while crossing Eurasia and taking on the shape of each land, a family of kindred steamed dumplings. Buuz is one of the fruits that this wide reach bore on the Mongolian steppe.