A dish with history

The dish has deep roots in the Mongol Empire. As early as the 13th Century, Mongolian horsemen travelled with frozen or dried manti that could be quickly cooked over a campfire: the boat shape exposed the meat directly to the heat, meaning both the dough and filling would cook simultaneously. In their book, Armenian Food: Fact, Fiction & Folklore, food historians Irina Petrosian and David Underwood suggest that the dish was first brought to Armenia during the short-lived Armenian-Mongol alliance of the mid-13th Century.

Mongolians travelling along the Silk Road also took the recipe to Central Asia. In fact, a dish very similar to Armenian manti appeared in Yin-Shan Cheng-Yao (Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink), a classic book of recipes published by a court doctor in 1330, during the Yuan Dynasty.

Today, in addition to the countless forms of dumplings found on Asian tables, versions of manti appear in many Turkic cuisines. In Uzbekistan, chuchvara is a relative of manti, but with the boat closed on the top, like a ravioli. Turkey has a manti-like dish called Tatar böreği, in which open triangle-shaped dumplings are filled with ground beef and topped with yoghurt, as well as Kayseri mantisi, which has smaller ‘boats’ and is traditionally prepared by a bride for her future mother-in-law before her wedding as a way of proving her culinary skills.