Manty Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Manty is made by rolling wheat dough thin, folding it around a mutton filling, and steaming it. It is a familiar dish on the tables of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, at home among nomadic and settled peoples alike.

Its two lead ingredients, wheat and mutton, are both long-established staples of the Central Asian land. The life of herding sheep across dry steppe and the work of milling wheat into flour sat side by side here from early on. Both the wrapper and the filling are made from what people already had at hand.

What gives the dish its form is the handwork of rolling the dough thin, wrapping the filling and steaming it over rising vapour. When the craft of folding met the craft of steaming, manty took on its recognisable shape. This style settled in Central Asia in the medieval period, roughly the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. It is widely said to have grown up as the food of Turkic nomads and to have been carried west to Anatolia through the Mongol expansion and the traffic of the Silk Roads. According to Holly Chase, nomads on the move are said to have carried frozen or dried manty, which they could quickly boil over a camp fire.

The steamed-dumpling family does not end in Central Asia. In Anatolia there is manti, wrapped very small, often spoken of as a sister of the mantou-type dumplings. Among these kin scattered across the wide expanse of Eurasia, Central Asian manty carries on the mutton filling and the steaming craft as its own style.

Trace the history of manty and the name itself becomes the first point of debate. One view holds that the name manti branched off from the Chinese mantou: the name of a Chinese steamed food reaching all the way west to become the name of a steppe dumpling. That is one way the story is told.

There is also a view that runs the other way. Crossroads of Cuisine (Brill, 2020), by Buell, Anderson and their co-authors, is described as attributing the word manty to the early Turkic peoples; read that way, the flow runs from Turkic manti to Chinese mantou. On the Chinese side, though, the word has an early attestation. In the Bing fu, a rhapsody written around 300 by Shu Xi of the Western Jin, the opening of spring is a time when, at banquets, mantou should be set out. The word mantou was already in Chinese by the end of the third century, though the text does not say what shape the food took. English Wikipedia, for its part, lists a proposal that the Chinese mantou is the source of the word manti. Which way the name travelled is still unsettled.

For the dish itself, an early record is the Yinshan Zhengyao, the imperial dietary manual that Hu Sihui presented to the Yuan court in 1330. Its first chapter gives recipes for mantou: mutton, mutton fat, scallion, ginger and dried tangerine peel, among others, chopped fine, mixed with seasonings, salt and fermented sauce into a filling, then wrapped and steamed. By that year at the latest, then, a mutton filling wrapped in dough and steamed was part of the Yuan court's fare. The word in the text, though, is mantou, and reading these as belonging to the Central Asian manti line is the interpretation of Buell and Anderson's English translation and commentary. The text itself says nothing about where the dish came from. From the Astana tombs at Turpan in Xinjiang, moreover, three crescent-shaped dumplings made of wheat flour are reported to have been unearthed in 1959 from a Tang-dynasty tomb. Some experts speculate that the filling was probably meat. The 2024 news report on the find presents it as evidence that dumplings travelled from the Central Plains of China west into the Western Regions. These, though, are boiled-dumpling shapes rather than the steamed manti proper, a distinction worth keeping in mind.

Even so, not everything has converged on a single point. Some place the exact homeland of the dumpling further west, in the Middle East and western Eurasia, and some hold that it arose in parallel at several places. Where it was born and which way it travelled, the direction of its name included, is not yet settled. The view that places its homeland on the Turkic steppe is widely voiced, while the view that looks further west has not been set aside.