Liz Crain - Dumplings Equal Love: Delicious Recipes from Around the World

DUMPLING DOUGHS

ASIAN-ORIGIN DUMPLINGS

DUMPLINGS BEYOND ASIA

DIPPING SAUCES

I was nine or ten years old the first time I had dumplings. My family was out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant not far from downtown Cincinnati, owned and run by a Chinese family. Our server, the restaurant owners son, who was in his late teens and always dressed in a fresh-pressed, immaculate black suit, smiled as he set the dumplings down in the middle of our table. He actually bowed to them. Then, with one hand behind his back, he lifted the steamer lid and a plume of savory, Chinese-chives-spiked steam wafted up toward our noses. I knew that food would never be the same for me again.

Every time we ate at that restaurant after that first bamboo steamer tray of shumai, and we ate there often, I hoped that our order would include them. It usually did, although sometimes spring rolls won out.

When Sasquatch Books asked me to write this cookbook, during a meal at the Portland Book Festival in 2018 where we unsurprisingly shared dumplings, this memory and others lit up for me, one after the other, like a meteor showerthe vegetarian Chinese su jiao dumplings I learned to make in my early twenties with my friend Raquel; the hundreds of thick-skinned pan-fried dumplings that I ate throughout college at the small just-off-campus counter-service Chinese restaurant; my first steamy platter of buttery potato pierogi at Portlands annual Polish Festival; the mind-expanding array of beautiful shrimp and pork dumplings I ate as a child while traveling throughout Asia with my travel-agent grandma; my first brothy, pleated Chinese xiao long bao that I hunted down in Seattle and was unsure how exactly to eat.

Most cultures claim and celebrate some sort of dumpling, regardless of what your definition of dumpling isand there are many. Historically, dumplings have been small, hand-filled, bite-size treats enjoyed morning, noon, and night. They are often made at home and with meager ingredients, and they are usually steeped in regional and familial stories.

I sourced many of the traditional, and beloved worldwide, dumplings in this book directly from friends and loved ones whose families hold these recipes dear and have passed them from generation to generation, such as the Korean pork and kimchi mandu, Japanese gyoza, and sour pickle pierogi. Other recipes were inspired by my family, my travels, and my home kitchen, such as the Cincinnati chili, shrimp and grits, bananas Foster, and nettle dumplings. All the dumplings in this cookbook are rooted in deep cultural respect, steeped in my own personal curiosity, and fed by a lot of nose-in-old-cookbooks research. I enjoyed immersing myself in the history and culture of many of the dishes and dumplings in these pages as much as I did developing the recipes.

To me, dumplings equal love no matter what culture they come from or how they are cooked. They are the food that I often crave when Im under the weather or my head hangs low. And they are the food that I want to cook for loved ones when they are going through a rough spell. Ive always carried a torch for hidden foods, the heart of the matter all steamy, aromatic, and nestled inside, waiting to comfort those who eat them. When you take a tender dumpling skin, fill it with deliciousness, and hand-form it, you are ensuring that every bite counts, that every moment matters.

This cookbook is at once a message of love via dumplings and a celebration of culinary diversity. Dumplings Equal Love includes more than twenty traditional and not-so-traditional dumpling recipes from around the world. In these pages, youll find recipes for everything from hearty, fist-sized, grated-potato-and-barley-flour Norwegian komper, and those small, delicate Chinese shumai, to Pacific Northwest morel dumplings in orange-hued, smoky pimenton skins. There are also recipes for everything from dumpling doughs that you can enhance with vibrant powdered vegetables, fruits, and spices, to versatile dipping sauces and workhorse pantry staples.

Mass-market, industrialized food lies on one end of the spectrum, dumplings decidedly on the other. No two homemade dumplings are ever exactly the same, and theyre often as strikingly beautiful as they are delicious. I love that, internationally, dumplings have always straddled the dual roles of inexpensive, and often familial, comfort food and ceremonial, celebratory festival and holiday food. Whether dumplings were delivered in a parade of platters at imperial Chinese banquets during Chinas more than two thousand years of emperor rule, or filled with healing herbs and boiled up over an outdoor fire to treat frostbite and illness, they have always provided us with regionalism in an ever-globalizing world. Their stories and flavors help us understand ourselves and others.