Pure Mongolian pleasures

This is the wild northern grassland where Mongolian ponies bearing the sons and grandsons of the Great Khan had thundered on the warpath. It's a lot quieter these days and full of tasty surprises, as Pauline D. Loh discovers at the dinning table.

It would be very hard to tempt me with lamb, I told myself at the end of six days in Inner Mongolia. As delicious as the lamb here was, I had just about reached my quota for the month, maybe the year. And then Chef Luo Gang came in bearing a platter of lamb breast.

This is the best part of the animal reserved only for special guests. The chef said as he whipped out a sharp little knife with a gleaming bone handle. He then proceeded to shave little slivers of white from the breastbone, and carefully placed them on my plate.

It was a very tactile experience driven by the determination to identify taste and texture, and I kept chewing until I finished every slice.

It did not taste like fat, although it looked like fat, and it was so soft that it was hard to think of it as bone or even cartilage. It did not have the pungency of lamb, and dipped into the little saucer of pickled wild flowering chives, it was ... delicious.

Luo Gang stood and beamed approvingly as we ate every morsel, and then made his way back into the kitchens, leaving his bone-handled knife stuck upright on the lamb breast.

My husband, who spent the better part of his youth in Inner Mongolia, had told me that rituals and showmanship were very much a part of the Mongolian character and that hospitality is the most important tradition. Chef Luo certainly demonstrated that facet with pomp, and style.

"He made that himself, and the handle is a very carefully chosen lamb shank bone," says Leslie Wang, general manager of the Shangri-la Manzhouli and my host at the hotel's Shang Palace. He had seen the covetous gleam in my eyes.

Not long after, a young assistant trotted in and retrieved the knife. Obviously, the Mongolian chef, too, knew it might be too much temptation lying about.

Apart from lamb, Mongolians on the great grassland of Hulunbeir on which Manzhouli sits also enjoy the harvest from the lake from which the prairie gets its name.

Tiny pale prawns, called white prawns, are quickly and simply flash-fried so diners can savor their addictive sweetness. And yes, it is hard to stop reaching for the tiny crustaceans because the shells are so soft they are almost non-existent and the flesh is firm and sugar sweet.

There are also small mullet-like fish so sensitive to pollution that they die almost as soon as they leave the water. Here, they are bought fresh every morning, and prepared at once because they will not keep. Again, like the prawns, their flesh is firm and sweet.

I had specifically asked for vegetables, and the first dish out was a soupy bowl of wild greens harvested from the grasslands.

"This is a herb that grows on the grasslands, and only the tender shoots are plucked and eaten. It's called liuhaoya," executive chef Gordon Sun explains. The dark-green shoots are slightly bitter with a nutty aftertaste, reminiscent of wild rocket leaves or organic arugula.

The next vegetable on the table is a platter of Chinese greens and tender lily bulbs cooked in mitang, the starchy broth left over from boiling rice. It coats the vegetables with a surprisingly smooth glaze, and again shows off the Mongolian talent of using totally natural ingredients to achieve successful culinary marriages.

Sometimes, the simplest dishes are the hardest to do well, but the greens were crisp but cooked and the slightly blanched lily bulbs added a fresh, sweet mouth-feel that was lubricated by the starchy glaze.

Sweet. That was the recurring theme in this meal, only there was absolutely nothing artificial about it.

Strangely enough, the only thing on the table that should be sweet was actually savory. Mongolian milk tea, traditionally the only source of vitamins and minerals in the nomadic lifestyle of old, is made with salt, not sugar.

Black tea such as pu'er is cooked in water and then milk and salt are added to the pot. The tea is served for breakfast or at any meal, and comes with side garnishes of roasted cracked rice and savory crackers. There is often hard goat's cheese, chipped and added to the hot tea so it melts gradually.

In the end, there was one particular dish I enjoyed very much in Manzhouli that day. It was hot juicy meat patties made with onions, and beef, not lamb.