Mont di Period COrigin theory CVerified

Mont di is an everyday dish of the Rakhine coast: thin rice noodles served with a fish broth and fermented fish paste. It is closely related to mohinga, the better-known noodle soup of central Myanmar, and in older usage the two were sometimes called by the same word, mont di.

Rice and fish, the two staples at the heart of the dish, had long been part of life in Southeast Asia and were on hand from early on. The coast of Rakhine State faces the Bay of Bengal, where the sea yields abundant catch and where making ngapi, the fermented fish paste, has always been woven into daily cooking. The craft of drawing thin noodles from rice flour was also long established in the region. Where this local bounty and handwork met, mont di spread as ordinary fare of the street stall and the home kitchen.

The clue to its age lies not in any royal cookbook but in poetry. The word mont di was used by the poet U Min during the latter half of King Bagyidaw's reign in the Konbaung dynasty, roughly between 1819 and 1837, and the court poet U Ponnya (1812 to about 1867) refers to the kindred mohinga in his Aleinga verse. By the early nineteenth century at the latest, then, a dish known by this name was already familiar to people. The historian Khin Maung Nyunt, noting that no formal recipe appears in the royal cookery texts, reads it as a commoners' food predating the colonial period.

A palace origin story has long been told about mont di. During the reign of King Mindon of the Konbaung dynasty (1853 to 1878), the tale runs, a pregnant queen longed to eat worms, and the villagers of Khotaung, answering her wish, tossed thick rice noodles with garlic oil, and so the dish was born.

No contemporary record supports the anecdote. Stories of this kind, which lend a dish an air of prestige by tying it to the court, are found in many places, and in any case this one accounts for the origin of the Khotaung variant (Khotaung mont di) rather than for Rakhine mont di itself.

The firmer footing for tracing the dish is not the legend but the word set down in verse. The appearance of the name mont di in the poets' work in the early nineteenth century is the earliest evidence that the dish was already among the people. When a name was first written down and where a dish first came into being are two separate questions, and mont di rose not from a court tale but from the daily table of those who lived along the Bay of Bengal.