International cuisine

And I’m not even going to say that there is “nothing like eating a homemade dumpling,” because eating one made by someone else can be a lot like eating a homemade one. (Granted, if you take your time and care, these are more delicate and tastier than most.)

But for those of you who like projects, or inviting a bunch of people over to chat, get tipsy, and make food, here are my friend Winnie’s mom’s famous dumplings (technically, they’re potstickers if you pan-fry them). Made right, they’re light, crisp, tender, meaty, crunchy with vegetables, sparky with ginger and aromatic with chives. That does sound like a pretty good evening, doesn’t it?

Mama Yang’s dumplings

Makes about 120 dumplings. A normal person can readily eat 12 as a main course. And feel free to mess with the quantity/combination of seasonings. All of them can be adjusted to taste. As for the wrappers, you can cheat and buy them pre-made — try to get the kind made of just flour and water, no egg or yellow dye — but if you’re not making your own skins for her mom’s dumplings, my friend Winnie will get all Tiger Mother on you.

And somewhere in the middle of this Chinese cornucopia, I saw a woman no bigger than the average American middle-schooler racing around from fridge to sink to stove. I shook Mei’s hand, fighting off the instinct to call her “Aunty.” Winnie said hi, her voice barely audible, vanishing from a terrible cold.

Within moments, Mei was showing me how to mix the filling for her dumplings, a process that involved sticking my hands forearm-deep into raw meat, constant worry that the kiddie-pool-size mixing bowl we had was still not big enough, and getting a man stronger than I to squeeze the water out of napa cabbage. (The recipe, as written, calls for “1 assistant, 5’9″, 200 pounds, athletic build.”)

Old friends of Winnie’s started to stream in, happy to see Mama Yang after years of leaving their homeland of St. Louis. And because conversations of the past tend to extend in that direction, I asked Mei how she learned to cook in the first place.

“I didn’t learn at home,” she said. She’s the second youngest of eight, and in her Taiwanese home, the oldest of her sisters took care of the kids-helping-in-the-kitchen department. But when she moved to America in the ’70s, to Utah, of all places, the sudden vanishing of all the flavors she grew up with inspired in her a sort of culinary awakening. By memory and osmosis and a group of chatty friends, she taught herself how to cook, inventing techniques when there were none she could recall, and in the process coming up with a dumpling recipe made so often she does it all by feel and sight.

Once, a neighbor asked if she could come watch her cook, to learn about this food. But it wasn’t long while watching Mei painstakingly roll out dumpling skins, filling and pleating and pinching each one shut, before the neighbor came through with some good old American ingenuity: “Mei, this is so dumb! Why don’t you just do it like a pie, like we do? Have all the filling and just put the dough on top!”

Mei huffed as she told this story, now two, maybe three decades old. “Hmph. This is three thousand years of history. That’s the beauty.” Then she added, “No machine can do this.”

“No, just the manual labor of children,” Winnie cracked softly, though it was hard to tell if the volume was because of her cold or if she was saying it so that her mom couldn’t hear. I giggled, now rolling out skins, only a dozen in and already feeling soreness in the pads of my fingers.

Winnie’s father, whose quiet shuffling about made me miss my own dad, came to the table to help with the skins. It was a watershed moment; in the lifetime that Mei’s been making these, he’d never before been seen commandeering a rolling pin. His grasp slipped, knocking over a glass of water, and Mei summoned her best Tiger Mother: “Next time, practice. At home!” I think she was joking, but it was the kind of joke that carried with it some weight. He smiled and carried on, in that adorable Papa kind of way.

Now six or seven helpers deep, Mei let the dumpling operation go and started cracking at the stove. Soon food began piling up, spreading over two tables. Ribs came out of the oven, ducks laid on a bed of stir-fried greens, noodles squiggled into an enormous pan. Fish began their swim in hot oil, and it was soon clear that it takes about a quarter of this much food to feed 20.

Then Mei started in on the dumplings, frying them crisp on the bottoms before steaming them soft and tender up top. All told, we had made almost 250 dumplings, and nearly everyone was already full by the time the first batch of them emerged from Mei’s kitchen. Still, the gobbling masses stormed the table. They were lovely, gingery and tender, deeply browned and satisfying.

At the edge of the kitchen, I saw Winnie on her couch, looking sick and exhausted. I caught her peering at the piles of food populating her apartment like guests themselves. She offered and then began pleading for people to take home leftovers. Someone opened her freezer door to help store the uncooked dumplings, then cracked, “Well, there’s no room in the freezer. Hell, there’s no air left in the freezer.”

And then I saw in Winnie’s eyes something familiar, the particular kind of feeling overwhelmed that can only come from your parents. The kind of overwhelming that happens when they only get a handful of chances a year to show you that they love you, and that they show you that they love you by doing things for you and feeding you, and that they do so with such intent, unsmiling force that it’s physically exhausting to receive it. (And to pack away the leftovers.) It’s overwhelming on its own, but then you feel like an ingrate that you feel this way, and that leads to Parental Overwhelming Version Two, which is an altogether more complicated mess of love and fear and exasperation and feeling like a kid again even though you’re an adult and wishing they will just leave you alone but hoping that you will never, ever have to see them go away.

But maybe I was just projecting.

Maybe I was thinking of my own mom and the rolls of paper towels she tries to cram into my tiny apartment and the weeks’ worth of leftovers whenever she gets to cook for me and the freezer that’s still full of the food she bought for me when she came to take care of me after an operation two years ago.

And maybe I was thinking of my own dad, and the one time I ever saw him fill a dumpling in our kitchen, which he did with an unexpected grace and speed. He told me, as I picked up a spoon to help him, that he learned to do this when he was young, when he worked in a Chinese restaurant in between classes to pay for college. And about to go off to college myself, I realized that there was so much about him that I didn’t know, even as we sat there silently tucking meat into wrappers.

And maybe I was especially thinking of these things today, the Chinese New Year, and of all the pesky instruction my mother used to give me: Clean your room before you go to bed, so you don’t sweep out the good luck in the new year! Eat candy to start the year sweet! Wear your new red clothes!

Today I woke up 1,500 miles from my parents. I ate candy and wore my dad’s old red sweater and rued that my apartment is a mess. And I missed Mom and Dad terribly.

So, anyway, haggis is a sheep’s stomach filled with miscellaneous sheep parts — heart, lungs, you get the picture. Stuff my Scottish friend Pam refers to as “the hearty meat,” and I don’t think that’s a pun. Americans have not, for decades, been very big on organ meats, and so even though I grew up with liver and tongue and would eat tripe and spleen till the cows came home (to reclaim them?), for me, there’s still some vestige of childhood blech that follows haggis around.

It might be — if I may demonstrate a prejudice — because Scottish cuisine rarely inspires, though I’ve actually had the privilege of being in Scotland and had an unforgettable culinary experience. It was this: I walked into a fish and chips shop. I looked at the large pile of chips (which we would call fries, of course). Then I looked next to them, at the filets of battered and fried fish. Then next to them, sat two discs of battered and fried … something. A small flag on a toothpick identified them. One read “hamburger.” The other, “cheeseburger.” Next to that, an oblong object: “Hot dog.” Then, a smaller oblong object: “Mars bar.” And finally, inconceivably, unbelievably: a large disc, the size of a Frisbee. “Pizza.”

They battered and deep fried a pizza.

Then again, this is a land where piles of fries are sometimes referred to as “Glasgow salad,” and when I told my Scottish friend Pam about my chip shop discovery, she mentioned something about being served that at school lunch. Somewhere, Jamie Oliver is crying hot tears. (Maybe he’d feel better if he heard her say it, with her lovely, soft, indistinguishable vowels: “the peetsa en er skewl.”) 

So with Pam and her husband, Michael, as my guides/interpreters, I ventured into the fold of haggis-eaters. It wasn’t a proper Burns Night, unfortunately, but at a British-themed restaurant in New York called Chip Shop, which is one of the few places in the city that reliably serves it. And yes, they deep fry it too.

I tried to get into the mood ahead of time with Mackie’s-brand haggis-flavored potato crisps (we call them chips), imported by the amazingly named Great Scot International. They were some of the stranger chips I’ve had, full of the taste of sweet spices and grains and a gently warming effect of black pepper, but not really organ-meaty. I suppose asking a potato chip to taste like sheep kidneys is a little like asking a beer to taste like a rainbow. I was left still unprepared.

We met at the restaurant, and Pam and Michael described the haggises they’ve known. Michael in particular disapproved of a version once served at a Scottish restaurant in Times Square, naturally called St. Andrews, where the haggis “looked like a thickened mush,” which is rarely how you want a meat dish described. Then again, Pam also noted that “St. Andrews moved at some point. It’s all weird and clean now.” I was starting to really look forward to dinner.

“Traditionally,” Pam continued, “haggis is made in a sheep’s stomach. Like a big … dumpling.” She held her hands as if holding a rugby ball. But most are now made in smaller casings, and you usually only get the whole deal for special occasions at this point, when “it has to look proper for a Burns Night supper.”

In it, there’s a mixture of oats, herbs, Scotch whisky and sheep innards, ground together and boiled boiled boiled until auld lang syne. “It’s basically just a poor person’s sausage,” Pam said, and I stopped making fun. Because that is what it was, and that is what so many of the foods so many cultures hold dear were and are.

The haggis came, and it looked … strange. Not at all what I expected, really — two blackish bricks, mostly covered by batter, but with the dark insides peeking through. The plate was garnished with two leaves of spinach lain side by side. Such healthful aplomb.

My fork dove in, and my head filled with strong flavor. Cloves! Thyme! Booze! It was kind of sausagey, densely packed but crumbly. It’s not dry, per se, but it had a sort of negative juiciness, like it wants to suck the moisture from your mouth. As I chewed, the sheep bits came through — kind of a livery, earthy, minerally flavor. Like mud and meat. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but I think I liked it. At least, I did enough to eat a portion roughly the size of my hand.

I was glad to have eaten it quickly, though, because when I went back for a bite a little while later, when it had cooled down, the texture seemed more gummy than meaty, I guess because the starches in the oats begin to tighten up. It’s not a happy-making effect, but Michael still enjoyed it, and I didn’t want to give the couple the wrong impression of my opinion on haggis. After all, they just told me they served haggis at their wedding.

But before I could write that detail down in my notes, making some Big Point about the Pride of the Scots and the Importance of Their Sheepy Food, Pam said, “But of course, people in Scotland eat a lot more curry than haggis.”

But there is one dessert I saw on a recent trip to Hong Kong that I couldn’t get enough of — ginger milk pudding. Calling it a “pudding,” though, isn’t entirely accurate, since it’s not thickened with eggs or starch or … anything, really. In fact, the literal translation is “ginger juice steamed milk,” and that is actually what it is: a bowl of beautiful white, its texture as much liquid as it is solid, sweet and round and pure with a warming glow of ginger. It’s kind of magical, even if the magic lies in a decidedly unwitchy chemistry. An enzyme in the ginger causes the milk to firm up a little when heated, and it does so just enough to turn it smooth and slippery in your spoon, like you may have pulled a custard out of the oven a little early, but man, are you glad you did.

The Chinese aren’t known for their love of milk (the absence of cream, cheese and crusty bread are the other things keeping them from One Perfect Cuisine status), and so the little shops that specialize in these puddings all over the Cantonese-speaking parts of the country always seem a little unexpected. Which is fine, since the sensation of slurping hot, spicy, just-set milk is as unexpected as it is lovely.

Ginger milk pudding
Recipe adapted from Ken Hom, “Fragrant Harbor Taste”; note the two methods for making this, if you’re steamer-averse
Serves 4

* To peel and juice ginger: Ginger skin is delicate and thin, so don’t use a peeler. Just use the edge of a spoon to scrape off the skin and save yourself a lot of waste. Then grate the ginger with the finest grater you have (then mince it with a knife for good measure if you want to maximize your juice) and squeeze it either against a very fine-mesh strainer, or with cheesecloth. At Asian groceries you can sometimes find a ginger juicer, which is a porcelain dish with a prickly patch in the center used to grate the ginger, and this makes quick work of it.