Unlike many Chinese, her husband and son eschew pork, preferring beef instead. Lao Yi tells me with her sharp R-studded Beijing accent that the reason you make dumplings yourself is so you can customize your xianr (filling).Ĭhoosing her own stuffing is important to Lao Yi. She’s 50 with the energy of a 20-year-old and has made dumplings since she was a little girl. She is nicknamed Lao Yi, which means “Old Aunt,” but she is the youngest old aunt anyone might meet. To find out, I go to Wang Ming Jun’s apartment in Haidan, the western part of Beijing. Dumplings are sometimes sold by the half-dozen, other times by weight and with a dizzying array of fillings such as lamb and pumpkin, or pork and fennel, tomato and egg and the Beijing classic: pork and cabbage. Just about every restaurant in Beijing makes its dumplings to order and at ridiculously low prices, $1 or less for a full plate. Here, boiled jiaozi are called shui jiao (water dumpling) and are served with black vinegar, sometimes spiked with chile, sesame oil or soy sauce. Though a lot of delicious tradition gave way to modernization and construction for the 2008 Olympics, small eateries serving dumplings remain plentiful in Beijing. If you’ve ever seen a boiled dumpling with all its funny folds and wrinkles, just add some imagination, and the story takes on multiple meanings, like so many things Chinese. He also fed his patients a soup containing two dumplings that were said to resemble a pair of ears. During the Han dynasty, it is said that Zhang Zhongjing, one of China’s most revered doctors, treated patients with frostbitten ears with a tonic of medicinal herbs and lamb wrapped in dough. However, their origins remain shrouded in folk tales. If you don’t break a tooth, you’re considered lucky for the year.ĭumplings seem to have been around forever - visitors can see fossilized dumplings found in an ancient tomb at the Turpan Museum in Xinjiang province. ![]() Some cooks even stuff a lump of sugar in a dumpling to ensure sweetness, and sometimes, a coin is hidden inside. ![]() Northern Chinese eat dumplings on New Year’s the way Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving (southerners have a whole different set of New Year eating traditions, relying more on sticky rice things).ĭumplings resemble the ingots that once were China’s currency, so eating them brings hope of an auspicious and fortunate year. ![]() Here in the north, that will mean televisions blaring, watermelon seeds cracking, mah-jongg tiles clacking and, most important, people wrapping and eating dumplings. On Saturday, amid the cacophony of firecrackers and other pyro-noise, most of China will be up all night to welcome in the Year of the Tiger.
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