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Etymology and History: Mantou Are Typically Eaten As A

Mantou are steamed buns that originate from northern China, where they are a staple food made from wheat flour, water, and leavening agents. They range in size and texture but traditionally were a luxury item due to the cost of white flour. Mantou and noodles formed the main carbohydrates in northern Chinese cuisine compared to rice in southern China. There are also legends about the origin of the name mantou, such as it referring to throwing stuffed buns resembling human heads into a river to appease spirits.

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74 views

Etymology and History: Mantou Are Typically Eaten As A

Mantou are steamed buns that originate from northern China, where they are a staple food made from wheat flour, water, and leavening agents. They range in size and texture but traditionally were a luxury item due to the cost of white flour. Mantou and noodles formed the main carbohydrates in northern Chinese cuisine compared to rice in southern China. There are also legends about the origin of the name mantou, such as it referring to throwing stuffed buns resembling human heads into a river to appease spirits.

Uploaded by

Jimmy Neturon
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Mantou are typically eaten as a staple food in northern parts of China where wheat, rather

than rice, is grown. They are made with milled wheat flour, water and leavening agents. In size
and texture, they range from 4 centimetres (1.6 in), soft and fluffy in the most elegant
restaurants, to over 15 centimetres (5.9 in), firm and dense for the working man's lunch. As white
flour, being more heavily processed, was once more expensive, white mantou were something of
a luxury in pre-industrial China.
Traditionally, mantou, bing, and wheat noodles were the staple carbohydrates of the northern
Chinese diet, analogous to rice, which forms the mainstay of the southern Chinese diet. They are
also known in the south, but are often served as street food or a restaurant dish, rather than as a
staple or home cooking. Restaurant mantou are often smaller and more delicate and can be
further manipulated, for example, by deep fryingand dipping in sweetened condensed milk.
They are often sold pre-cooked in the frozen section of Asian supermarkets, ready for
preparation by steaming or heating in the microwave oven.
A similar food, but with a savory or sweet filling inside, is baozi.[2] Mantou is the older word, and in
some regions (such as the Jiangnan region of China, and Korea) mantou (or the equivalent local
reading of the word) can be used to indicate both the filled and unfilled buns, while in Japan the
equivalent local reading of the word refers only to filled buns.

Etymology and history[edit]

Deep-fried mantou, a popular Chinese dessert served with sweetened condensed milk

The Mongols are thought to have taken the filled (baozi) style of mantou to many countries of
Central and East Asia about the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th century. The
name mantou is cognate to manty and mant; these are filled dumplings
in Turkish,[3] Persian,[4] Uzbek,[5] andPakistani ("mantu")[6] cuisines.
Some[who?] allege that this type of dish was very popular in the Han dynasty (202 BCE220
CE),[citation needed] under the name bing (; ;bng).[citation needed] During the Western Jin dynasty (265
316 CE), Shu Xi () wrote about steamed cakes (; ; zhngbng) in his "Ode to boiled
cakes" (; ; tngbngf), written around 300 CE. He first called them mantou (
; ; mntu). In this book, it was advised to eat this in a banquet during the approach of
spring.[7]

Folklore[edit]
A popular Chinese legend relates that the name mantou actually originated from
the homophonous word mntu, which literally means "barbarian's head".
The legend was set in the Three Kingdoms period (220280 CE) when Zhuge Liang,
the Chancellor of the state of Shu Han, led the Shu army on a campaign against Nanman forces
in the southern lands of Shu, which correspond to roughly present-day Yunnan, China, and
northern Myanmar.
After subduing the Nanman king Meng Huo, Zhuge Liang led the army back to Shu, but met a
swift-flowing river which defied all attempts to cross it. A barbarian lord informed him that in olden
days, the barbarians would sacrifice 49 men and throw their heads into the river to appease the
river deity and allow them to cross. As Zhuge Liang did not want to cause any more of his men to
lose their lives, he ordered his men to slaughter the livestock the army brought along, and fill
their meat into buns shaped roughly like human heads (round with a flat base). The buns were
then thrown into the river. After a successful crossing, he named the bun "barbarian's head"
(mntu, , which evolved into the modern ).[8] Another version of the story relates back
to Zhuge Liang's southern campaign when he instructed that his soldiers who had fallen sick
from diarrhoea and other illnesses in the swampy region be fed with steamed buns with meat or
sweet fillings.[9]

Variations in meaning outside northern China[edit]

These peach mantous found at a Chinese restaurant in Japan containred bean paste as fillings.

Prior to the Song dynasty (9601279), the word mantou meant both filled and unfilled buns.[citation
needed]

The term baozi arose in the Song dynasty to indicate filled buns only.[citation needed] As a

result, mantou gradually came to indicate only unfilled buns in Mandarin and other varieties of
Chinese.
In many areas, however, mantou still retains its meaning of filled buns. In the Jiangnan region
where Wu Chinese is spoken, it usually means both filled and unfilled buns. In Shanxi, where Jin
Chinese is spoken, unfilled buns are often called momo (), which is simply the character for
"steamed bun". The name momo spread to Tibet and Nepal and usually now refers to filled buns
or dumplings.[10]

The name mantou is cognate to manty and mant; these are filled dumplings
in Turkish,[11] Persian,[12] Uzbek,[13] and Pakistani ("mantu")[14] cuisines. In Japan, manj ()
usually indicates filled buns, which traditionally contain bean paste or minced meat-vegetable
mixture (nikuman "meatmanj").[15] Filled mantou are called siyopaw in Philippine,[16] from
the Spanish sipao, ultimately derived from Chinese shobo (). In Thailand, they called
filled mantou as "salapao".[17] In Korea, mandu ()[18] can refer to both baozi or jiaozi ().
In Mongolian cuisine, manty or mantu are steamed dumplings[19] and a steamed variation is said
to have led to the Korean mandu.[20] In Singapore, the dish chilli crab is commonly served with a
fried version of mantou.[21][22][23]

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