Dumplings

I'm in the middle of cooking Independence Day foods -- real American potato salad with egg and mayo, slaw (though with an Asian flair), meat for the BBQ. And suddenly, I find myself thinking about dumplings.

A few days ago, I read this wonderful piece by Jennifer 8 Lee, author of the Fortune Cookie Chronicles: I Believe in the Power of Dumplings. Favorite quote:

But pause and reflect nearly every culture has some version of a meat and vegetable bundle in a carbohydrate casing — and if they don’t, they borrowed it from somewhere else. In China they had potstickers, which became gyoza in Japan, manduk in Korea and momos in Tibet. In Brazil, land of meat, gyoza were brought over by Japanese immigrants and morphed into gargantuan things the size of a man’s first. There are also the dumpling cousins: Italian raviolis, Jewish Kreplach, Indian samosas, Jamaican patties, Polish perogis, and Ukranian varenikt. Humans, much like we’re genetically programmed to think babies are cute and protection-worthy, are designed to love dumplings.

And then, I found a review of Chicago dumplings published a couple months ago in Gourmet magazine online -- Eight Great Dumplings in Chicago. Food reviewer David Tamarkin briefly described a couple kinds of Asian dumplings, pierogis, robust, beef-filled kreplach at a deli, Viennese spaetzele, Lithuanian Koldunai, and Ethiopian sambusa.

Funny train of thought. I resist the urge to google for more...