Mongolia.

Dairy is the half of the cuisine outsiders rarely hear about. All five animals are milked, and the summer, when they are in milk and the herds are fat on new grass, is the season of tsagaan idee. Milk is soured into tarag, scalded and left to set into urum, the thick clotted cream skimmed off the top and eaten on bread; it is pressed into fresh byaslag cheese, dried into aaruul, the rock-hard curd chunks that sit in sacks on ger roofs drying in the sun, and fermented into airag, the mildly alcoholic mare's milk drunk by the bowl. Almost none of this is sweetened. Aaruul is sour and jaw-testing, airag is tart and faintly fizzy, and even the tea is salted rather than sugared — suutei tsai, green brick tea boiled with milk and salt, sits on the stove all day.

The wheat half is worked with a small set of techniques repeated endlessly. Dough is rolled thin and either wrapped around meat — steamed as buuz, fried flat as khuushuur, shrunk to thumb size and boiled as bansh — or cut into noodles. The noodle habit is the telling one: in tsuivan the strips are laid over stewing mutton and vegetables and cooked in the steam coming off them, then tossed through, so nothing is drained away. In a kitchen where water is carried and fuel is dung or scarce wood, boiling a large pot and throwing the water out is simply waste. The same logic makes bantan out of nothing but broth and dampened flour crumbs.

Occasion cooking happens outdoors and involves fire directly. Khorkhog packs bone-in mutton between fire-heated river stones inside a sealed metal milk churn; boodog cooks a goat or marmot from the inside with stones in its own emptied carcass. Both are group food for summer gatherings. The calendar peaks twice: Naadam in July, when khuushuur are fried by the tray, and Tsagaan Sar, the lunar new year, when households make buuz by the thousand, freeze them outside the door and serve them beside a boiled sheep's back and a tower of layered boov biscuits.

The honest comparison with the neighbours is one of shared forms and different handling. The dumplings belong to the same Inner Asian family as Tibetan momo and Chinese baozi; tsuivan takes its name from chao mian; buuz are equally at home in Buryatia and Inner Mongolia. Russian influence in the twentieth century brought potato, carrot, cabbage and a taste for pickles, which is why vegetables appear at all. What stays distinctly Mongolian is the restraint — meat unspiced, fat kept, dairy central, and nothing served hotter than salt.