I recently finished another lap around the sun and celebrated my birthday with an intimate dinner with friends and family. My cuisine pick? Dim sum. We feasted on Din Tai Fung’s xiao long bao and custard buns. The food came quick and hot — much like birthdays in your 30s. It occurred to me on the first day of my new year that dumplings have been a fave birthday cuisine of mine for a long time. Teenage birthdays were spent at Hua Zhu, a small family-run restaurant under a block of flats in Singapore that became our family favourite. A nearby reflexology stone walk aided digestion from overindulging. Balmy nights at Hua Zhu is one of the reasons I associate plastic chopsticks, crab corn soup, and dewy cans of 100 Plus with a special kind of carefree joy.
In my 20s, Shanghai Village tucked into Melbourne’s Little Bourke Street was a well-worn fave amongst me and my friends. It might be overly romantic to say Shanghai Village has a special place in my heart, but it’s true. Every table in the joint had the same sticky red bottle of vinegar and soy sauce that perfectly complimented each dish on the menu, none more so than my fave: fried pork dumplings. CCTV stills adorned a wall near the exit, kindly reminding patrons to pay their bill, unless of course, they wanted their picture up there, too. Shadowy photographs are a sharp contrast to the rest of their hot pink decor. As we left Din Tai Fung after my latest birthday dinner, the Christmas tree was going up in Covent Garden. I felt miles away from my uni days at Shanghai Village and their wall of shame.
Earlier in the afternoon, I strolled through Bloomsbury and Soho ducking into every bookstore and art shop along the way. I treated myself to a new book, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai, by Nina Mingya Powles. It jumped out at me from the shelves and landed in my hot little hands. I am halfway through and it’s on my reading challenge list to read before the end of the year.
Since dim sum seem to be a major theme in my life right now I thought they deserved a feature. Where did they come from? When I wrote about hash browns earlier in the year (drool) I was reminded that in most cuisines it can be difficult to pinpoint their exact conception. I expected dumplings to be no different. After all, many cultures across the globe have their own version of dumplings from ravioli to pierogi. I wanted to learn about the history of east Asian dumplings and their subsets. I was surprised to find that mainstream food-lore attributes a single person have invented dumplings, and they grew from there.
According to historical experts, dumplings were conceived by Zhang Zhongjing. Zhongjing was a Chinese medicine man in the Eastern Han Dynasty. The story goes that it was a particularly harsh winter with many people falling ill due to the cold. Zhongjing combined speciality herbs that improved blood circulation and deterred frostbite with chillis and mutton. He then wrapped the mixture in dough before steaming them to hold them in place and keep them warm.
The type of dumplings Zhongjing is accredited for making are known as jiaozi dumplings. In addition to being the first type of dumpling, they also have great cultural significance attached to them. Jiaozi dumplings are folded in a way that resembles Chinese sycee, which are gold and silver ingots used in imperial China as a form of currency. There was no central bank or mint to uniform sycee creations, therefore individual gold and silversmiths created the forms. As such, their value was determined by the shape and details in each ingot.
Jiaozi dumplings are filled with herbal mixtures of ground meat or vegetables and sealed with pressed edges. They are then steamed, boiled, or pan-fried and served with dips such as sesame oil and black vinegar. Sometimes they are served with soup.
After Zhongjing created dumplings as a healing modality (as they remain to be) dumpling recipes appeared in Apicius, a Roman cookbook. Apicius was compiled in 1 Century AD and was interestingly arranged in ten books, similar to that of contemporary cookbooks. Titles included:
Epimeles — The Careful Housekeeper
Ospreon — Pulse, Legumes
Thalassa — The Sea, Sea-food
Aeropetes — Birds, Poultry
You get the idea. At this point in history, dumplings travelled around for many centuries with no real identity. For the most part, they remained unchanged. I found all this interesting in my research but I wanted to know more about dumpling sub-sets.
Dumplings began to be differentiated by quintessential characteristics during the Tang Dynasty. Wonton dumplings grew popular in southern China and evolved into a distinctive style: less filling and a yellow square dough wrapper. They are made by placing a square of dough in ones palm, dolloping a small amount of filling in the centre and then sealing the wonton whilst pressing the air out of the interior before sculpting into the desired shape and joining the edges together.
Having been around for only 150 years, beloved xiao long bao is the new kid on the block in the world of dim sum. Legend tells xiao long bao were born in Nanxiang, a suburb of Shanghai. Chef Huang Mingxian ran a restaurant, Ri Hua Xuan. Like any chef worth their salt, he wanted to delight his patrons. His inception was to add a jellied meat stock that would melt when steamed to create a broth effect inside the dumpling. People flocked to try it. Eventually, the dumpling was named xiao long bao — literally meaning little basket bun. Xiao long bao were added to Din Tai Fung’s menu in mid-20th century Taiwan. From here, they skyrocketed to global acclaim and many moons later became my birthday dinner wish.
Har gow are steamed crystal shrimp dumplings and are a classic in Cantonese cooking. Har gow are personified as being the perfect mouthful of well-cooked (read: not overcooked) shrimp wrapped tenderly in a translucent sheath. Their dough is made from a mixture of tapioca and wheat starch that gives them a shiny jewel quality. Har gow first reportedly appeared in the outskirts of Guangzhou at a teahouse that neighboured a river brimming with fresh shrimp. Some reports claim that making quality har gow are the skill that dim sum chefs are judged on.
Researching and writing about the origin of beloved foods never fails to inspire me. It reminds me that food has always, and will continue to, connect us. Food is the nexus of history, culture, and communities. And it’s delicious, so there’s that, too. ■
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