Bansh Period COrigin theory CVerified

Bansh (банш) is a Mongolian dumpling: a thin wheat wrapper folded small around a filling of minced mutton (or beef) and onion, and boiled. Besides being eaten boiled, it goes into soup, as banshtai shöl (банштай шөл, soup with bansh), and into tea, as banshtai tsai (банштай цай). Among Mongolia's own meat dumplings it holds the small-and-boiled place, alongside the larger steamed buuz and the fried khuushuur.

Mutton, the heart of the filling, was the very substance of a herding existence and had long been part of life on the steppe. Wheat, for the wrapper, was not a grain traditionally grown within the herding way of life, and dumplings of this kind, a filling closed in a wheat skin, came onto the steppe under the influence of Chinese cooking. The habit of wrapping a filling in a thin skin and boiling it small is likewise thought to have entered the steppe from Chinese wheat-flour cooking, and then to have been reworked around Mongolian ingredients, mutton and onion.

How early dishes of mutton wrapped in a wheat skin were being made is suggested by the Yinshan Zhengyao (飲膳正要, 1330), a dietary manual of the Yuan court. Its first chapter records a filling of chopped mutton, mutton fat and sheep's tail, with scallion, dried tangerine peel and ginger, closed in a wrapper of wheat flour, so by the first half of the fourteenth century at the latest the Yuan court was making dishes of mutton in a wheat skin. The wheat-wrapped dishes in that chapter include some that are baked and some that are steamed, as well as some that are fried in oil and then put into a mutton broth. None of them, though, is recorded under the name bansh, and they cannot simply be equated with bansh as it is made today. Some see bansh as one branch of the meat dumplings found from Central Asia to East Asia.

Bansh is often summed up in a single line: Mongolian dumplings came from Chinese dumplings. As far as the name goes, the remark holds up well, but it does not tell the whole story.

Follow the name, and the tie to China does come into view. Dictionaries derive bansh (банш) from the Chinese biǎnshí (扁食). The steamed buuz is said to take its name from baozi (包子) and the fried khuushuur from huǒshāoer (火烧儿), which would mean that each of the three dishes borrowed its name from a different Chinese word. The dictionaries do not say when the word was in use. The same word does turn up, written 匾食, in the Yinshan Zhengyao (1330), the Yuan court's dietary manual, as something added to a broth of simmered mutton: mutton bianshi the size of a fingernail. The manual says nothing of a wrapper or how it was folded, so whether it had the shape of today's bansh cannot be told. The same book also sets down fillings of chopped mutton, mutton fat and scallion closed in a wheat skin. Paul Buell and Eugene Anderson have published an annotated English translation of the manual.

Buuz (steamed), khuushuur (fried), and bansh (small and boiled) all share the same wheat skin and mutton filling, and part only by their cooking. They are more like siblings than parent and child; none of them gave rise to another. Further afield, meat wrapped in wheat dough turns up as manti, mandu, momo, and baozi, from Central Asia across to East Asia. Some take bansh as one member of that wide spread rather than tracing it back to a single point in China. How it is actually related to those dishes is unclear, though, and this remains one way of seeing it. Its name and technique can be followed back to China; where it sits within the wider spread is a matter on which views differ.

One thread stays open. The earliest documentary attestation of the name bansh itself, and a linguistic study that takes on the sound-change from biǎnshí directly, have yet to turn up; the etymology rests on the agreement of dictionaries and reference works.