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, was part of daily life. How far back the craft of drawing thin noodles from rice flour goes in the region has not been established. Where this local bounty and handwork met, mont di spread as ordinary fare of the street stall and the home kitchen.

How old the dish is remains unknown. According to the English-language Wikipedia, the poet U Min used the word mont di during the latter half of King Bagyidaw's reign in the Konbaung dynasty, roughly between 1819 and 1837, but what he meant by it was mohinga of central Myanmar. The same encyclopedia says that the reference in the Aleinga verse of the court poet U Ponnya (1812 to about 1867) also concerns mohinga, and it treats the view of the historian Khin Maung Nyunt as a remark about mohinga too: finding no formal recipe in the royal cookery texts, he reads that dish as a commoners' food predating the colonial period. When Rakhine mont di itself first appears in writing has not been established.

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.

So how far back does Rakhine mont di go? The mont di that appears in early nineteenth-century verse was, by the encyclopedia's account, a name for mohinga of central Myanmar, and the verse says nothing about whether Rakhine mont di already existed at the time. The court tale can account at most for the Khotaung variant; mont di itself is thought to have grown out of the daily table of those who lived along the Bay of Bengal.