Mark Siddall
October 28, 2020
What is a dumpling?
Or really, what isn’t a dumpling?
There seems to be no necessary or sufficient condition that defines “dumpling”. The dropped-into-soup dumplings of my suburban Canadian childhood are not the exquisite mouth bombs I know from Taipei as “soup dumplings”. Indeed, quite opposite as to which-side-of-what the soup is on.
Fundamentally what “chicken soup with dumplings” may invoke in the imagination of one (won ton soup), can bear little resemblance to that experienced by another (matzoh ball soup). Regardless, the point is the same. Warmth and comfort.
Gnocchi is the closest non-Anglo-Saxon dumpling-like thing to what I grew up thinking was a dumpling. To me, a dumpling was a starch ball dropped into hot liquid to make it taste like something about which only Grandmothers knew the secrets. I sense that the proper way to make gnocchi is to make a starch ball become something hardly at all reminiscent of a starch ball when done.
Even if we agree that noodles are not dumplings, a noodle wrapped around something is very much a dumpling. Ravioli, shiu jiao, tortellini, and mandu? Dumplings all. Mashed potato wrapped in dough instead of noodle? Pierogis are most certainly dumplings. As are the many pierogi variants and cousins like pelmeni, vareniki, and khinkali (a true soup-dumpling from the Caucasus). Many of these have wrappers that blur the line between dough and noodle.
Last year I was invited to an Egyptian/Afghani engagement party. The hosts were Egyptian. But, the Afghani food was better because… dumplings! Afghani coriander-spiced lamb mantu dumplings swimming in a yogurt sauce are nothing like their kimchi-stuffed Korean cognate: mandu. Turkey has manti. The Uyghurs, manta. All of these were under the unyielding thumb of the Mongol Empire during the first half of the 13th Century.
Perhaps the lasting legacy of the Silk Road isn’t just the spices, but the dumplings in which the spices were put. Dumplings were spread across the Mongolian Empire as a practical way to have lightweight desiccated food that won’t easily spoil (ready to boil and eat between massacres). If you’ve ever had two 5 year olds at a table demanding ravioli equity, I expect it’s not unlike a platoon of Mongols demanding the same after a gruelling ride across the steppes. It’s easy enough even now to find dried cheese tortellini unrefrigerated on a grocery store shelf. Or tortellini al prosciutto crudo, if you know the right grocery stores.
If there is a silk purse made from a sow’s ear somewhere, it’s a pork dumpling.
…and it’s called thung thong.
To my mind, a dumpling has to be boiled or steamed. Otherwise the noble empanada and the Cornish pastie would have to be admitted to the pantheon of “dumpling” instead of rightfully being “pie”. But I suppose that would mean pan fried jiaozi are pies, not dumplings.
Regardless, the boy wanted dumplings, and I was not going to disappoint him.
I’m not a one-pot dinner kind of home cook. And though chicken stew or chicken soup with dumplings lends itself to that approach, that’s #notme. It’s simply not possible to get the liquid to become a stupendous stock and the chicken to be succulent at the same time and in the same time. Either the stock will be thin or the chicken will be dry. Yes, wet chicken can be dry. Maybe “mealy” is more apt, but it feels dry on your tongue from overcooking.
A slow low cook on the carrots in the stock should yield sweet, delectable orange masterpieces infused with flavor and spice. If the stock never boiled they should still be firm enough to offer some resistance to the tooth. If they are mushy, toss them and treat new carrots the same as turnips below here.
A dumpling can be as simple as flour, egg, salt, and water. Always looking to get more nutrition into the boy, I nuked a couple of potatoes and scraped out their fluffy flesh to add to the mix. This is more like a Polish kopytka dumpling than the Irish one my mom would serve.
In truth, dumplings have always been the vehicle for maximizing nutrition and minimizing waste. The original European dumpling was a mechanism to bind up suet (or schmaltz) rather than have a greasy oil slick on top of your medieval gruel. Dumplings can bind up fat, hide bits of liver, even blood.
Twice as much flour as potato by volume. Scant additions of nutmeg, turmeric and onion powder rounded out the mix. A good dose of baking powder (1 tsp / cup and a half of whatever-else) ensured they would double in size when boiled. Maybe a 1/4 cup of milk. It’s one of those things for which you know you have the right consistency only by the heft and the feel of it in your hand. Like cement.
Having established that boiling is anathema to the chicken and carrots, there’s a problem. We are going to have to boil the broth to cook the dumplings. And the boy had invited turnips to the party. Turnips were easy enough. Cut into chunks and boiled in the broth until just tender, then removed and combined with the reserved spatchocked chicken meat and carrots. All three now separately and perfectly cooked waiting to be brought to life with hot broth.
The end result was a hearty heady bowl of pure love with inviting dumplings barely afloat in the rich broth. Fluffy yet dense in the protected middle like a potato pancake. Moist and supple all around having soaked up the amber broth. A broth thickened subtly by the dumplings having giving back a little of themselves to it in return.
Reconstructed chicken stew with dumplings.
A culinary hug to my son.
No… he didn’t eat the edamame.