In 1995, Hillary Clinton traveled to Mongolia as First Lady of the United States of America. While there, she visited the yurt of a Mongolian couple, Zanabaatur and his wife Haliun, who offered her a hospitable drink of traditional airag. She accepted and drank with a diplomatic gulp. The strange drink would make the news and, later, Clinton would remember drinking airag in some of her travel anecdotes, but this was nothing new. Outsiders have been fascinated by airag, also called koumiss, for thousands of years, often commenting on its flavor, production methods, and general ubiquity on the Central Asian steppes.
Why should we care about what Hillary Clinton drank in Mongolia? The drink itself is the interesting part. It was airag or koumiss, and koumiss is a rather unique drink. It is fermented mare’s milk, a sour and alcoholic horse’s milk to be more explicit. Not many cultures around the world drink horse’s milk, but Central Asians have been doing it forever.
The harsh realities of nomadic life on the Asian steppe meant that most livestock were unsuitable for the husbandry of the Kyrgyz, Turkic, and Mongolian peoples. Horses, though, could cover vast distances as their owners roamed across the largest continent on Earth. In the winter, they could live outside, feeding themselves by digging for grass beneath the snow. (West). Cows, sheep, and goats were less suited to the environment, so the Asian nomads took milk from the same animals that they rode.
Even with this seemingly beneficial arrangement, food was scarce for everyone in winter and mare’s could not be milked during the cold months. Guaranteeing a steady supply of nutritious food, the Central Asian peoples developed world-class dairy preservation techniques that they still use today. Fermenting mares milk into koumiss is only the most common and short-lived of these methods. Mongolians also made shuurmik, a dried yogurt paste that can be mixed with water in months of scarcity to make a nutritious drink. (Rubruck) Tibetan, Afghani, and Kyrgyz peoples have all used similar dairy drying processes.
Koumiss has long been a dietary staple for those who live nomadically from Mongolia all the way to the Caspian Sea. Some techniques have changed over time and can differ by location, but the general procedure is to milk a mare and collect the liquid in a vessel made of smoked and stiffened horse hide (Mongolians traditionally used salt and milk to waterproof hides)
Then, the milk is churned excessively, separating out fatty solids from the liquid. The 19th century orientalist, Sir Henry Yule, noted that visitors would typically take a turn at churning the vat of koumiss in their host’s household. Yeast and bacteria can be added intentionally, but traditionally the fermentation was spontaneous. Koumiss vessels must have had residual yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that inoculated each new batch.
In a way, foreigners making observations about koumiss is as old as history itself. Herodotus, sometimes called the Father of History, gives an early account of the koumiss drinking peoples to the East of the Mediterranean world:
Now the Scythians blind all their slaves, because of the milk they drink. When done milking, they pour the milk into deep wooden buckets, and make their slaves stand around the buckets and shake the milk; they draw off what stands on the surface and value this most; what lies at the bottom is less valued. This is why the Scythians blind all prisoners whom they take: for they do not cultivate the soil, but are nomads. (Hdt. 4.2.1-2)
The Scythians are not exactly Mongolian. Not only did Herodotus write over 1,500 years before Genghis Khan conquered Central Asia, but the Scythians originated in modern day Iran. They came to occupy Anatolia during the time of the Greek historian. Nevertheless, they were nomadic people living in a geographically similar place and using the same livestock. The drink described in Book Four of Herodotus’s Histories must have been an ancient precursor to modern Mongolia airag.
It is not until much later that the Western world begins to have accounts of the central Asian steppe, and we can thank the Khans for that. Under the Pax Mongolica, which started in the early 1200s with Genghis Khan’s westward conquest and lasted over a century, Central Asia was united for the first time. Travelers could now do something that was formerly suicidal, they could cross Asia and live to tell the tale.
Suddenly, in the 13th and 14th centuries, legendary accounts of travel in far off lands emerge. John of Pian de Carpine led the first European trek into Mongolian lands in 1245. William of Rubruck traveled to Mongolia and wrote about it in the 1250s. Marco Polo traveled east starting in the 1270s and met Kublai Khan on papal business. Around the same time, a monk born in Beijing, Rabban Bar Ṣawma, made it all the way to Europe. The conquest of the Khan’s made it so the vast expanse of Asia was passable.
With the journeys of Pian de Carpine, Rubruck, and Marco Polo came new accounts of fermented mare’s milk. These travelogues are detailed and paint a picture of airag, or cosmos as Marco Polo has it, as fundamental to Central Asian life. While we can question the accuracy, truthfulness, and quality of these accounts, they nonetheless show great fascination with the beverage.
In his account of Mongolian life, Pian de Carpine shows that mare’s milk was so central to Mongolian life, that it became religious. He wrote, “They have certain idols made of felt in the image of a man, and above these they place things made of felt in the shape of tits, and these they believe to be the guardians of their flocks, and that they insure them increase of milk and colts….To these said idols they offer the first milk of every flock and of every herd of mares: and when they begin to eat or drink, they offer them of their food or drink.” Milk was the only sanitary source of hydration for these nomads, their worship of it should come as no surprise. The traveler also reports that it is taboo to spill any milk on the ground. It was the lifeblood of their civilization.
Shortly after, Rubruck gives an account of how koumiss was made in the 13th century. He noticed that the foals, or children, were kept close to the mares at milking time, otherwise the mothers wouldn’t give milk. After mares are milked, Rubruck explains how the koumiss is rendered. “They set to churning it with a stick prepared for that purpose, and when they have beaten it sharply it begins to boil up like new wine and to sour or ferment, and they continue to churn it until they have extracted butter. Then they taste it, and when it is mildly pungent, they drink it. It is pungent on the tongue like rape wine [thin wine made from dregs] when drunk it leaves a taste of milk of almonds on the tongue, and it makes the inner man most joyful and also intoxicates weak heads and greatly provokes urine.” Rubruck also explains that there is a version of the drink reserved for the elite in Mongolian society: caracosmos or black koumiss.
When Rubruck arrived at Karakorum, then the capital of the Mongolian Empire, one thing stood out above all else. Möngke Khan stopped in the city twice a year, once on his way east in the springtime and again heading back west in the summer. The nomadic court that the Khan held was extravagant, a testament to the power and expansiveness of the Mongolian empire. Part of this was a fountain that ran with rice wine, bal (Mongolian mead), and caracosmos, or clarified, fermented mare’s milk.
Rubruck describes the Silver Fountain of Karakorum in detail:
“In the entry of this great palace, it being unseemly to bring in there skins of milk and other drinks, master William the Parisian had made for [the Khan] a great silver tree, and at its roots are four lions of silver, each with a conduit through it, and all belching forth white milk of mares. And four conduits are led inside the tree to its tops, which are bent downward, and on each of these is also a gilded serpent whose tail twines round the tree. And from one of these pipes flows wine, from another caracosmos or clarified mare’s milk, from another bal, a drink made with honey, and from another rice mead which is called terracina; and for each liquor there is a special silver bowl at the foot of the tree to receive it… Outside the palace is a cellar in which the liquors are stored, and there are servants all ready to pour them out when they hear the angel trumpeting.” The extravagance of the display accentuates the importance of mare’s milk to Mongolian society, even intimating power.
Finally, Marco Polo mentions the silver tree of Karakorum, but not in such glamorous detail as Rubruck. In other accounts of Marco Polo, mare’s milk appears with similar extravagance. In one instance, “On a bench before [Batu Khan] was koumiss in stately cups of silver and gold set with precious stones.” The drink was not only dietary, there is a clear relation between Mongolian power and fermented mare’s milk.
Alcoholic horse’s milk–strange to the European yet beloved by the Mongolian. Any cultural exchange between the two societies will touch upon the beverage. Dairy was the staple food of the nomadic peoples. For many today, it still is. Airag is the national drink of modern Mongolia and other neighboring countries have similar beverages. Kyrgyz people, for example, make airan and chalap with yogurt (a substitute for fermented mare’s milk), salt, and cold water.
What do Hillary Clinton and Marco Polo have in common? Fermented mare’s milk, that’s what.
Clark, Larry V. “The Turkic and Mongol Words in William of Rubruck’s Journey (1253-1255).” Journal of the American Oriental Society (1973): 181-189.
Herodotus, with an English translation by A. D. Godley. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1920.
“Kyrgyz Chalap.” Kyrgyz Children’s Future, www.kyrgyzchildrensfuture.org/kyrgyz-recipes/chalap/.
Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo: Greatly Amended and Enlarged from Valuable Early Manuscripts Recently Published by the French Society of Geography and in Italy by Count Baldelli Boni. Oliver & Boyd, 1847.
Rubruck, William. The Journey of William of Rubruck. Translated by William Woodville Rockhill.
West, Stephanie. “Introducing the Scythians: Herodotus on koumiss (4.2).” Museum Helveticum 56.2 (1999): 76-86.
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