"About 3,000," said the matriarch of a large family.

"I hope you like mutton," said my language teacher, ominously, the day before we departed.

Our first stop was a ger (traditional nomad dwelling) in the town of Moren. Inside the round felt structure a half-dozen children, parents, and friends looked on as a woman ladled suutei tsai (salted milk tea) out of a pot set atop the wood-burning stove.

Just behind the stove, the Tsaagan Tsar food was laid out: boov (cookies fried in beef tallow), candy, aaruul (dried curds), homemade butter, the back and tail of a sheep, and the better part of a boiled goat--head included--cut up in a bowl. After tea was served, a man cut me a chunk of fat from the sheep rump. To my surprise, it was good, like a piece of grainy, smoked butter. I realized then that the taste of Mongolian food is proportional to how cold you were before eating it. Outside, it was fifteen below. Sheep fat and salty tea hit a spot I didn't know I had.

Still, the buuz were lurking. When they came out, my initial reaction was that they, too, were tasty. But we made a tactical error. We ate quickly. In Mongolia, where hospitality for wayfarers can be a matter of life and death, a guests' bowl never stays empty long. Soon we were on our tenth buuz, with no end in sight.

The night ended with vodka. One person served, passing and refilling a glass. Before taking a drink, each person dipped their right ring finger into the glass three times, flicking vodka into the air after each dip. According to legend, the practice originated in the days when people killed their enemies (Genghis Khaan's father, for example) by poisoning their beverages. After each flick, vodka trickles down onto the ring on your finger. If, by the third flick, the ring has changed colors, it's probably not a good idea to drink. Bachelors all, we set to.

Technically, Tsaagan Tsar lasts three days. But the feast lasts much longer. Over the next two weeks of our trip we ate so many buuz we began to smell like sheep, and were just as round. Eventually, we developed a conversation to break the ice with locals:

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"Do you like Tsaagan Tsar?" one of us would ask.

"Yes."

"How many buuz have you eaten?"

"[Some large number.] And you?"

"At least a thousand."

The truth is that, buuz by buuz, we were beginning to enjoy the countryside cuisine. Perhaps it was the experience of eating it: the boundless hospitality, the slow ritual progression from tea to meat to vodka, the feeling of huddling around a stove with strangers, in outposts surrounded by cold. Either way, we began to say, when hungry, "Man, I could really use some buuz."

We spent our last day driving on frozen rivers in the Siberian taiga, headed, with several Mongolians, for a cabin where an old woman was hosting a Tsaagan Tsar celebration.