I’ve read two very different stories of the origin of Mongolian barbecue. They are as follows:
It was originally created by Mongolian soldiers, as they cooked their meals on their shields at camp.
It was created in China by street vendors. The term “Mongolian” in China means something like “unusual” and since the method used to cook the food was unusual, it became “Mongolian”.
I personally think the second one is the most believable. Anyone know the facts?
Is there such a thing beyond “B.D.'s” and its copycats? Really, I’ve never heard of it outside the context of this commercial chain. It just so happens that we dined there tonight!
Absolutely. I first encountered it at the Officer’s Club at one of the military bases here in Panama about 1988.
The first place I had gone to was called Genghis Khan and it arrived here years before BD’s. Although maybe not before BDs were elsewhere.
Anyway, their menus gave a story like the first one, but that there would be a cook who would do everyone’s cooking on a metal disc, not on their shields.
Probably all a bunch of hooey anyway. Probably some marketing guy in Hoboken, NJ thought of it.
I first saw it at Colonel Lee’s Mongolian BBQ in South Pasadena CA around 1979. Their story was the Mongolian soldiers cooking on their shields.
Some websites claims that Mongolian barbeque is a modern invention modeled after the Korean dish of bulgogi or on the Japanese teppanyaki restaurants.
I just remembered that when my older brother came back from the Vietnam War, he told us about something called a Mongolian barbeque. He demonstrated it for us. It’s no longer clear to me whether he meant that it was the only thing that certain restaurants in Saigon would do or if it was an occasional event in them. Here’s a website where someone else has the same memory of their father talking about a Mongolian barbeque:
http://www.geocities.com/parentsworkshop/r_mainmeal.html
(Page down a bit.)
All I know is that a buddy of mine worked in Ulaan Baatar for a year or so, and when I asked him if Mongolian Barbecue was authentic, he said something like this:
“No. Not at all. The food’s pretty boring. You pretty much get to choose whether you want your mutton fried or boiled, but that’s about it.”
Here’s a website with someone having something that they call “Mongolian barbeque” in Mongolia:
http://www.downtheroad.org/Asia/Journals/8Inner_Mongolia_journal.htm
(Again, you have to page down a bit.)
I forgot to add that it’s a specific dish more than a type of restaurant.
Here’s a website claiming that Mongolian barbeque is a modern Chinese invention based on Korean bulgogi:
http://www.viahistoria.com/SilverHorde/main.html?research/MostlyMongolianCooking.html
I’m pretty sure the Mongols didn’t use metal shields.
I’ve also heard the Korean barbeque origin. Side note: many Koreans claim there’s an ethnic “kinship” between Koreans and Mongolians, similar to the relation between, e.g., Scandanavians and Germans. Whether this is important for the Mongolian barbeque style, I do not know.
And as a matter of practicality: how do you cook on a shield? Shields are mostly wood, with leather and metal added as desired. Cooking on a shield would weaken and burn the wood and/or leather. As for as I know, all-metal shields were never used, being too heavy.
Mongolian is part of the Altaic language family. Korean and Japanese are sometimes conjectured to be distantly related to this family (and sometimes the Uralic language family is added in too). If the Koreans and Mongolians are related linguistically at this level, it would probably be more than 10,000 years ago. (And that’s perhaps five times further back than the linguistic relationships between the Scandanavians and the Germans.) Any significant genetic relationship betweens Koreans and Mongolians would probably be about the same length of time. However, there’s no reason that there couldn’t be much more recent cultural contact between the two peoples.
I agree completely with the linguistic evidence, Wendell. I was just repeating what I’ve heard Koreans say.
There has been recent cultural contact between the Koreans and Mongolians. The Khans used Korean soldiers and ships (the fleets wiped out by the kami kaze were largely Korean).
To add to the confusion when people wonder about this in the future, The BD’s organization opened a “Mongolian Barbeque” recently in Mongolia. Heh. So in ten years or so, someone can confidently cite as evidence that fact that when they ate in Ulaan Baatar, they ate in a restaurant an awful lot like the one in Peoria.
Historically, Mongols and Koreans are geographically pretty close neighboring tribes separated by Manchurians.
Since Korea was part of the Mongol Empire, Koreans would have been ruled by Mongols much more recently.