John Lorinc - What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings

The cover features brightly coloured illustrations of a kitchen counter filled with food. The centre of the cover features a red cutting board on top of which is the book title in a decorative hand-written font with the D drawn as a dumpling. Around the edges of the cutting board are drawings of garlic, chopsticks, ginger, half a red onion, cilantro, a mushroom, chopped potato, green onion, a ravioli, a hot pepper, a peach and more.

Michal Stein

S itting in molasses traffic on a Saturday afternoon, all I could think about was the bag full of Tibetan momo in the passenger seat beside me. The smell of meat and chili sauce. No one would notice if one went missing, I thought. The guys at TC Tibetan Momo in Etobicoke had even thrown in some patties for free when I told them I was going to a dumpling party surely they would be fair game if I needed a snack. But I was forty minutes late to the Dumplings Around the World feast, and the least I could do was arrive with all my contributions intact.

I arrived at Alexs apartment, balancing two orders of momo in one hand and a cooler full of ravioli in the other, plus a plastic bag full of paper plates and napkins. Everyone was already there, waiting for me.

Finally! called Alex.

Crowded around an oblong table, we started to lay out the dumplings. I began with my two orders of momo one beef, one vegetable the patties, and packs of pickled cabbage.

Beside a pile of chopsticks and forks, and a bowl of sour cream, Miriam set down what looked like a salad, but was in fact individual lettuce leaves containing shredded vegetables, each pocket already dressed.

Erica put out three kinds of pierogies: beef, potato and cheddar, and sweet cheese.

Jordy and Becca, who had flown in from Brooklyn for the occasion, ordered dim sum, which took up the entire lower third of the table: shrimp cakes, barbecue pork buns, fried shrimp balls, har gao, shrimp dumplings, siu mai, red bean cakes, sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf, xiaolongbao, vegetable dumplings, and rice noodle rolls.

Sarah brought the dish that would become the most controversial of them all: samosa.

With the table nearly full, Brandon squeezed in chicken and vegetable gyoza, plus the coxinha he had picked up on Alexs behalf. Someone balanced a tray of grocery store mochi on the edge.

Due to my late arrival, we had no time to boil Elas stinging nettle ravioli, so she set it down in its zip-lock bag; she would cook it and toss it with butter after we took the photo.

We adorned the Lazy Susan with hot sauce, soy sauce, and mustard. The table was complete.

Before digging in, Alex snapped a photo from above. I tweeted it out, saying, We did dumplings around the world.

By the time I went to bed that night, it had been retweeted 43 times and had 443 likes. Over the next forty-eight hours, it would be shared over 32,000 times, rack up 1,600 comments, and get more than 236,000 likes.

It was April 9, 2022. The pandemic hadnt ended. People felt strongly about dumplings.

One Sunday afternoon in April 2019, a group of my friends and I gathered at Dim Sum King on Dundas Street in Toronto for Julie-Rae Kings twenty-eighth birthday. Jordy, a twenty-six-year-old museum manager, brought her new girlfriend, Becca, a twenty-eight-year-old arts professional, both of them in town from New York. Julie-Rae, who worked in theatre, was there with Alex, her twenty-seven-year-old fianc from Scotland.

We were tied together by summer camp Julie-Rae, Jordy, and I had grown up at camp together, first as campers, then as counsellors, and, in Julies case, eventually running the whole thing. After participating in the same youth movement in the U.K., Alex had joined us as a counsellor. Becca went to a sister camp in Pennsylvania. Other camp friends may have been present for the feast perhaps Erica, then a twenty-six-year-old medical student, and Ela, a twenty-six-year-old GIS mapper. But they werent sure whether they were actually present for that 2019 lunch or if we had just talked about it so much that it had become part of our collective memory.

We spent hours waving down the carts, watching for our favourites siu mai, har gao, cheung fun. After stuffing ourselves to the point that we were more dim sum than human, the conversation turned to dumplings.

There we were a group of Jews, sitting around, eating a lot of pork and shrimp. As unkosher as it gets. And yet, as someone held up a shrimp dumpling, the question arose: could kreplach, the solemn dumpling of our shtetl ancestors, find a place at the dim sum table?

From kreplach, we moved to pierogi. Could one serve pierogi at dim sum? True, pierogies were accompanied by sour cream, not soy sauce. But they shared an undeniable common formula: meat or vegetables, wrapped in dough, then steamed, boiled, or fried. Gyoza. Tibetan momo. Ravioli. Tortellini. Samosa. Was a calzone a dumpling?

Every culture, we concluded, had its own signature dumpling.

We set ourselves a mission: one day, we would gather as many different dumplings as we could find and set off on a culinary voyage of dumplings around the world. We would reconvene one year later, for the occasion of Julie-Raes twenty-ninth birthday: April 7, 2020.

Just over two years later, on a hot Saturday in late August 2021, I was sitting in Alexs apartment with that same group of friends, the air conditioner running on high. Julie-Raes absence hung heavily in the room. After suffering a sudden pulmonary embolism two weeks earlier, she had slipped into a coma and never woke up. She died that Wednesday, and the funeral had been held the day before.

Jordy and Becca were back in town, too. In a series of events that felt like a badly written soap opera, Jordys mother died the same morning Julie had been rushed to the hospital. Between the two deaths, our little group spent most of August becoming expert shiva attendees.

Technically, theres no shiva on a Saturday, the Sabbath, but we wanted to be together to make sure Alex wasnt alone. We called it a Speakeasy Shiva no grown-ups allowed, no strange relatives, no random congregation members eager to get the afternoon prayers started. Just the group of friends in their late twenties and early thirties trying to understand how it was possible that Julie-Rae, the friend we could always count on to organize our get-togethers, wasnt there to organize this one.

But for the Speakeasy Shivas raison dtre, it would have been a pretty good party. We couldnt quite figure out how many people were going to come. Ten? Eighteen? Twenty-five? I had picked up a few pancake boxes from Emmas Country Kitchen and made two blueberry-peach French toast casseroles.

Friends we hadnt seen since before the pandemic began to arrive, and we spent hours looking at photos and telling stories. As the afternoon wore on and the party waned, a few of us piled onto the sectional couch in the living room, kicking Alexs languid dog, Daisy, out of the prime corner spot.

Jules never got her Dumplings Around the World birthday, someone said.

Born in April, Julie-Rae had two pandemic birthdays in deep lockdown. A year and a half into the pandemic, it felt like ages since wed been able to properly spend time together. Like everyone else, all our celebrations had been kicked down the road. We assumed that one day wed be able to throw everyone a birthday party that would make up for the ones spent on Zoom. Julie and Alex postponed their wedding twice in the hopes that theyd be able to have a full celebration with friends and family, including Alexs from Scotland.