About

Moving to The City has given wings to a long-brooded project: a quest to Eat All the Dumplings. We like dumplings, in our family: potstickers, boiled wontons, momos, ravioli, gnocchi, We make them. We buy them. We read about them with our child. Herewith, a diary of our dumpling progress.

To paraphrase Marx, people eat dumplings, but they do not eat them just as they please. Knowing enough about climate crisis and large-scale agriculture, we find it increasingly difficult to eat land animals. Seafood and dairy stay in our wheelhouse. We’re not purists about it. But this dumpling progress will mostly leave pork, beef, and lamb behind…alas! For these are the heart of many great dumplings. We can only treasure our memories of Saturday fried chive-and-pork dumplings, char siu bao, and siu mai at the now-vanished Chau Chow City, or special expeditions to Koi Palace when we lived on its peninsula; of getting our hands very messy with globs of pork and shrimp at an annual New Year’s dumpling-making; of sublimities in strip malls in the Vancouver periphery during a conference a decade ago; even of making chicken and dumplings, back when Cook’s Illustrated published actually good recipes.

But it’s not only about regret. I love a good egg-and-garlic-chive-filled dumpling (as suggested in Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice). Keeping seafood in the mix means we still have har gau to go on. It’s been a decade or more but I haven’t forgotten what Dim Sum Go Go was capable of then. Where we lived before, the child argued forcefully that an entire dinner could, and should, be made out of giant mushroom “char siu” bao as prepared by Penang of Edison. And let’s face it, Impossible Meat makes a pretty creditable guotie filling, if you don’t worry too much about the manufacturing process. And if think of Europe, we have even more options: for what fills ravioli better than cheese, or squash, or squash and cheese? Have I not known the quenelles de brochet of Lyon?

And I mentioned a child. Yes, the best dumplings are probably made at home in a weekend cooking projects, or ordered at a restaurant reached after an hour-long subway / LIRR ride. But such things are special occasions, at least in our lives, and we can’t wait for a special occasion for dumplings. And we live in the City of Delivery. Now, we know delivery is not easy on the dumpling. Pastas degrade fast after cooking, and reheating usually changes them for the worse—with the important, nay crucial, exception of taking boiled dumplings and frying them. Yet a great dumpling overcomes. So the progress continues. We’ll record the dumplings here. We keep the faith. The sun of dim sum will never dim!