Disclaimer: To any of you who might even remotely take offense at this post, which is filthy with broad generalizations and oversimplifications, please forgive me in advance. This is not meant to offend anyone, for any reason.
My father used to say that you could always tell whether or not you were in a Jewish neighborhood not based on the number of synagogues it had, but on the number of Asian restaurants. Seems peculiar, but the statement–a broad generalization if there ever was one–does hold some water, and I’ve never really understood why. As a student, I spent a fair amount of time in England, where I took advantage of the overabundance of Indian and Middle Eastern restaurants, and their presence felt far more intuitive to me in a gastro-political sort of way. I’m the furthest thing there is from a colonial, but my personal sense of the British Empire was that its power lay only partially in its square footage, and more in the profound culinary influences brought back home. Just read Elizabeth David and Jennifer Brennan, and you’ll agree. This is not to knock the merits of indigenous British food: last night I spent a few hours curled up on my couch, reading Jocasta Innes‘ recipes for everything from Wensleydale cheese to homemade sausage. Jane Grigson is next up. Must be the change in the weather.
Anyway, it’s hard to pinpoint why Asian food–specifically Chinese–is so vitally connected to Jewish American culinary culture; for sure, the former when served to the latter is bastardized in the extreme. Shrimp in Lobster Sauce just screams subversive trayf at the top of its lungs, as does the char siu pork that shows up in everything from lo mein to won ton soup. There’s an old joke: the only place pork is kosher is in an egg roll. It’s hard to disagree when you’ve grown up the way I have.
There is, though, one deeply beloved item of food that is eaten throughout Asia, from Korea and Vietnam to China, Japan, Nepal, Malaysia, India, Turkey, and Tibet and far beyond that also shows up in traditional Jewish dishes everywhere: the dumpling. I grew up with it as kreplach, which is nothing more than a vehicle for using up every bit of meat, like flanken, or brisket. Larger, rolled, and stuffed with fruit or dairy (like farmer cheese), it becomes a blintz. Made with a thicker dough and stuffed with potato or meat, it turns into pierogen (or, in Polish, pierogi, or in Russian, piroshki). In Jewish and Asian homes wherever they may be, dumplings are ubiquitous, and they are Poor Man’s Feast food at its best and most addictive.
This is why the decided lack of cookbook coverage on this most universal of dishes is such a conundrum; certainly, dumpling makers of every stripe and background are so confident that they’ve got the best, accurate, or most delicious recipe lodged in their brains or tucked into the stained and sticky box of recipes passed down through the matriarchal ages that it would be pointless (not to mention fraught) to assume that there might be, for example, a sine qua non of kreplach, or vada, or manti, or potsticker, or har gow shrimp dumpling recipe. Even my neighbor Danny grows misty when he talks about his 80- year old mother’s kreplach that she continues to make, huddled over her stove in the Bronx, and which her adult children and grandchildren eat straight out of the pot; the dumplings never even make it to the plate. I’ve repeatedly asked for the recipe over the years, or to have the honor of making them with her, by her side, since my own family’s kreplach makers are long gone. That recipe? There isn’t one. But her version, time after time, is the best. Likewise, when I announced to one of my best friends from high school that I was going to attempt to make manti, this friend, who is Turkish and whose mother is an outstanding cook, groaned when I told her where I’d gotten the recipe. “Please,” she said, ” just don’t.” Like it or not, the fact of hard recipes for dumplings, Asian or Jewish, falls neatly into the “my grandmother can beat up your grandmother” category.
So what does this mean in terms of keeping culture alive through dish and recipe, especially when younger people have less and less time, or inclination to spend it in the kitchen making something they can either buy frozen or pick up the phone and order from their local takeout? It means, simply, that we–those of us who love culinary anthropology in all its universal forms, and who understand that it can mean the very survival of a culinary culture and its cross-pollination and ultimately, evolution–have to look at recipes as not just recipes: we have to look at them as historical documents to be held in the highest esteem and treated with the utmost of importance. This is why comparing Sandra Lee or even Martha Stewart to, say, Rick Bayless, Tony Bourdain, Andrew Zimmern, or Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford is like comparing apples to oranges: this is when cookbooks cease being “just cookbooks.”
This is a very long way of saying that when Andrea Nguyen‘s new book, Asian Dumplings: Mastering Gyoza, Spring Rolls, Samosas, and More arrived recently, I knew it wasn’t going to be a light read. Like her previous book, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, Asian Dumplings is far more than just a simple cookbook of magnificent recipes: it’s compelling personal history. It’s compelling international history. It’s explanation and painstakingly precise description. It’s the kind of bedrock treatise on a single subject of such staggering cultural importance that it will forever change the regional culinary landscape, assuming it never goes out of print. Here, in a relatively small volume packed with stunning photography meant to obviously inform as well as entice, Nguyen treats her subject with the precision of a surgeon coupled with the kind of delicious narrative that makes the book a veritable page-turner. The recipes? Mouthwatering, and this weekend I will be making pork dumplings from scratch, wrappers included, even though I have a package of 200 sitting frozen in my kitchen. Stay tuned.
I never gave much thought to the dumpling connection–that idiosyncratic thread that ties Vietnamese Banh Gio to Chinese Zongzi to Manti to Tamale to Potsticker to Shu Mai to Pierogi to Blintz to Kreplach, but it’s there, as bright and obvious as the silk and rice roads were thousands of years ago.
I’ll never think of my bubbie’s dumplings the same way again.
