The history of “Mantı” revealed

Aylin Tan together with Fuchsia Dunlop has written an extensive paper on the topic of “Mantı” and its journey from China following the Silk Road where they presented together at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 2012. Mrs. Tan started her seminar at YESAM by first explaining this journey.

“Within the geography that ranges from China following the Silk Road all the way to Anatolia, dumpling, or ‘Mantı’ as we know it in Turkish, take on many different names and shapes, made with various fillings and served with various sauces.” For Turks ‘mantı’ is a dish, boiled, sometimes fried sometimes steamed, dumplings with sauce, which you eat with a spoon and it is a complete dish on its own.”

“The root of Turkish ‘mantı’can easily be tracked by the examples existing in the vast geography of Turkic Central Asia and Caucasia. This wide geographical spread indicates a deep rooted shared culinary heritage. However in Turkey, ‘manti’, is more or less the generic word for any stuffed dumpling, variations being numerous. There are also some stuffed dumplings, almost identical to ‘mantı’ in shape and cooking technique, but named differently,” stated Mrs. Tan during her seminar.

Based on her research the earliest recipe that she could find that relates to ‘mantı’ is ‘tutmaç’ which is a noodle dish made by the Turks. The earliest recording of ‘tutmaç’ is from the Arabic- Turkish dictionary called ‘Divan-ü Lugati’t Türk’ written by Mahmoud al Kashgari. ‘Tutmaç’ mentioned in this dictionary is hand cut noodles boiled in a yoghurt based soup. So there is no filling, but there is some minced meat in the dish itself. It is sort of like a deconstructed ‘mantı.’

“The earliest written Ottoman mantı recipe appears in the 15th century Ottoman cookbook written by Muhammed bin Mahmud Shirvani as a new entry, when it was revised into Ottoman Turkish. The recipe of ‘mantı’ is with minced lamb and chickpea filling flavoured with cinnamon and vinegar, and served with garlic yogurt and sumac. There are no other written records of ‘mantı’ between 15th and 19th centuries; however it does not mean that it did not exist during this time period.”

Upon finishing the history on “manti” Mrs. Tan moved on to the very explicit chart that she had made that includes types of dumplings found all over Anatolia, together with a map. The chart included information such as the type of filling, cooking method, the sauce and which region that specific dumpling belongs to.

After the seminar the guests enjoyed a variety of dumplings from different parts of Anatolia with different fillings served with different sauces.

5 March 2014

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