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Reigning dumplings

Reigning dumplings

Shortly after Special Olympics chairman Tim Shriver arrived in Shanghai, China, the host city for the 2007 competitive games last October, he found himself at the kitchen table in a Chinese household making dumplings.

Dumplings were not his forte. Still, as his organization was in the midst of bringing 5,000 athletes together for an international sports program, he felt getting involved with a country’s culinary traditions was key to opening the door to a country’s culture. So there he was. Several women near the table provided advice on making jiaozi, a crescent-shaped meat-filled dumpling, crimped at the top.

Enthusiastic applause greeted the successful effort of Shriver, who is the son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics, and the late R. Sargent Shriver, first chairman of the Peace Corps.

The athletes followed Shriver, visiting with families in what he describes as the “world’s classroom for the lessons of acceptance, dignity and inclusion.”

Just as the dumpling served as a bridge between far-flung countries for Shriver, it also is a common thread in a vast country with more than 1.3 billion people.

“The dumpling is a gastronomic ambassador across China’s regions, ethnic groups and even religions,” says Ted Anthony, a former China News Editor of The Associated Press.

Though pork is a popular filling, the Chinese landscape and the adaptability of dumpling recipes are broad enough to handle the great variety of religious and ethnic dietary mandates in the country.

Dumplings may be sweet or fiery hot, small as a pearl or as large as a soup bowl. But China’s varying climates and topography have dictated one constant in the 3,000-year history of Chinese dumplings: The wrappings are traditionally wheat-based in the north and rice-based in the south.

Though chefs can serve more than 100 varieties of dumplings, that “doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of the variety prepared in the kitchens every day throughout every province in China,” says San Francisco-based celebrity chef Martin Yan, who recently established his Martin Yan Culinary Arts Institute in Chengdu, located in the “spice box” province of Sichuan.

“You are not using just one filling or one way of folding, or even one way of cooking,” he says. “It is an art, an age-old heritage for thousands of years, different from city to city, village to village. The fillings could be anything: chopped nuts, fermented rice, red-bean paste and many varieties of vegetables, meats and seafood.”

The Cantonese call their version of the jiaozi “bao gee.” In the south it may be steamed or deep-fried. Up north it usually would be boiled. If the jiaozi is flipped into a frying pan for browning, it would be called guotie, which translates as “pot stickers.”

Won tons, or hundun in Mandarin, are usually smaller and have a more irregular shape than jiaozi.

In Xi’an, China’s capital for 1,000 years, restaurants are famous for their dumplings.

At this central Chinese city’s Tang Dynasty Theatre Restaurant, which features music programs from the Tang reign, ending in 907 A.D., the first item on its extensive prix-fixe menu is a dumpling dish.

In Shanghai, the steamed soup dumpling, or xiao long bao, is a popular item, prepared with a gelatinous dollop of soup, and usually a ball of seasoned pork, sealed in dough. As the dumpling is steamed, the gelatin melts to provide the diner with a burst of hot, nutritious food.

If the diner is not careful, Yan says, “he may have to go looking for a new tie or even a new suit.”

Special Olympics chief Shriver recalls an earlier visit to the city of Harbin “in the frozen north near the Russian border” where a restaurant had a dumpling assembly line. At the first site of Dongfang Jiaozi Wang, “Eastern Dumpling King,” which is now a chain, fillings included such items as shrimp, pork, mutton, chives, corn and pine nuts.

Frommer’s China guide says, at the chain, “an army of chefs wrap and boil the dumplings with inconceivable speed.”

Dumplings have been mentioned throughout ancient Chinese writings and in recent years Chinese archeologists discovered petrified dumplings in a wooden bowl at a Tang Dynasty tomb site.

“The dumplings look just like the jiaozi being made today,” says British author Fuchsia Dunlop, who penned “Land of Plenty” and was the first foreigner to be admitted to the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu.

Dunlop says spicier Sichuan jiaozi, or zhong shui jiao, are distinguished by the use of chile oil sauce, aromatic soy and garlic with a ground-pork filling.

A continuing expansion and refinement in the use of spices is expected to kick up the heat in Sichuanese food with fried chiles sizzled in oil to provide a scorched-chile flavor. Sichuan pepper helps transform the food into “hot and numbing dishes…notoriously fiery,” Dunlop says.

The hot-food reputation of Sichuan and Hunan cuisine has given China a chance to claim its own version of “Spice Girls” long before the name was coined for the popular singing group.

Dunlop, in her research, confirms the “spice girl,” or la mei zi, reference among the locals. It is the fiery foods, she asserts, that keep the residents generating body warmth during the winters and have a cooling effect in the summer by encouraging perspiration—a yin-and-yang effect that the Chinese believe produces a healthy lifestyle.

The dumpling is so ingrained in Chinese culture that for every variation of the dumpling, the Chinese have a different anecdote, myth or superstition.

Many stories dealing with the Chinese New Year center on tokens of good luck, health and fortune, especially for those who find a coin in their jiaozi. There is even a dumpling resembling an ancient Chinese gold piece.

One puzzling story about the Gou Bu Li dumpling restaurant of Tianjin, just east of Beijing, continues to evolve. The name roughly translates into “a dog wouldn’t eat it.”

In one version of the story, the proprietor would not share his secret recipe for steamed dumplings with the locals who then jeered, “Gou bu li,” to anyone approaching the shop. The dumplings were so delicious his business thrived, but the name stuck.

Another version is that a young boy was found in a garbage dump by the Chen family and they adopted him. Amazed that he wasn’t touched by the carnivorous dogs that frequented the dump searching for food, they nicknamed him Gou Bu Li.

More recently, the Reuters news service reported that the Chinese government, in preparation for the large crowds from the West at the 2008 Olympics, decided to “modernize” the names of some popular restaurants. Believe it or not, China slated a new name for Gou Bu Li: “Go Believe.”

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