Jingisukan (Genghis Khan) Period BOrigin theory DVerified

Jingisukan is mutton, sliced thin or cut in blocks, cooked on a domed iron griddle whose raised center lets the juices run off. It is one of Hokkaido's best-known regional dishes, eaten with the meat and vegetables marinated or dipped in a soy-based sauce, everyone gathered around the smoke and sizzle.

What made the dish possible was mutton becoming an ordinary food. Sheep are not native to the Japanese table, and mutton could only reach it once sheep-raising and its trade spread. After the First World War, Japan set out to produce its own wool and pushed to expand sheep farming, and herds grew in Hokkaido and elsewhere. In places where mutton was now at hand, the habit of grilling and eating sheep took root.

The idea is thought to have come from the Chinese mainland, from kao yang rou, grilled mutton. Adapted for Japanese tastes, it took on its own pan and its own dipping sauce and settled into the form we know as Jingisukan. It established itself as a Hokkaido regional dish through the late 1940s and 1950s, and a commercial sauce launched in 1956 helped carry it into home kitchens.

The usual story runs like this: Genghis Khan, campaigning across the steppe, had his soldiers grill mutton in the open field, and the dish, and its name, come down from that great conqueror. It is a stirring pedigree, and it suits a dish of mutton grilled with such bravado.

Yet the record does not bear it out. No such dish exists in Mongolia, and the tale linking it to Genghis Khan is thought to have been made up in twentieth-century Japan. The name Seikishikan, the Japanese rendering of Genghis Khan, first appears in print in 1926, in a cookbook of Chinese home cooking, and it seems to have been a coinage by Japanese then living on the mainland. One account credits a man named Tokuzo Komai. The heroic origin, in other words, was a costume added after the dish already existed.

So Jingisukan is a dish that grew up in twentieth-century Japan: drawn from mainland grilled mutton, and made possible in Hokkaido and elsewhere once wool policy had made mutton a familiar food. It is not an old tradition reaching back to Genghis Khan; only the name borrows a hero from long ago. The real course of things tells the story of this dish far better.