Turkey, Pork & Chinese Chive Dumplings

How Adapting My Dad's Dumpling Recipe Has Helped Me Make a Chinese Tradition My Own

As a child, I used to watch rapt as my father and his cousin wrapped dumplings in the back room of our Chinese restaurant. I loved the dull thunk the enormous Chinese cleavers made as they turned long, fat tubes of snowy dough into scallop-shaped pieces whose edges rose in a spongy, weak protest. I remember the efficient way they used a wooden rolling pin to turn them into perfect discs, chatting the whole time in the Mandarin I didn't speak.

My nose perked up in excitement on those days when I smelled the distinctive aroma of seasoned meat (ground by my father himself) and Chinese chives, sourced from my mom's garden in the summertime. They'd distribute this marinated pork into those precise rounds of dough with two butter knives that were used in the restaurant specifically for making dumplings, wontons, dim sum and crab rangoons.

To this day, I can still picture their work-worn fingers, rough with callouses and swollen with tired joints, delicately pinching neat, uniform pleats into every plump little pocket. The wrinkles in their chapped skin stood out a stark white as the fine flour they used to dust the work table and the dumpling wrappers pressed firmly into them in sharp relief.

For non-restaurateurs, recollections might run closer to what was portrayed in Crazy Rich Asians—generations of family members gathered in a room to wrap dumplings ahead of Chinese New Year, where they're a symbolic, auspicious food meant to symbolize gold ingots and good fortune. But while my specific memory, part of a collective one for a unique generation of American Chinese takeout kids, is a way of life that is disappearing, the way we make dumplings is ages old. Over talk, over conversation, over shared work.

Between grinding the meat, chopping the chives, building the seasoning, marinating the filling, and making, rising and shaping the dough, making dumplings wholly from scratch is typically a days-long endeavor. Stuffing, shaping, then freezing or cooking add hours more. Ultimately, they are labors of love, each one as unique as the individual who made it, and all the more special for the conversation that happens around each step.

Like Italian red sauce, dumplings are delicious nearly anywhere, and every family has their own recipe, interpretation and secret ingredient that makes their dumplings taste as expected yet unmistakably different. And as my dad closed up shop and I moved to Louisiana and Georgia from New York, I found that no one made a dumpling quite like he did. The balance of dough to filling, the fragrance of his marinade, which incorporated his also-from-scratch brown sauce (the generically called base sauce for stir-fries), the perfect amount of juice that would extrude and fill the dumpling as it cooked … between his red-lacquered spare ribs and his dumplings, these were the tastes of home.

But, as we all learn in adulthood, home is what your family makes it. Once you leave that familial home and create one of your own, you learn just how hard it is to duplicate the feelings, the flavors, the textures.

I never mastered the art of from-scratch dumpling-making. I don't roll dough out well nor evenly and my pleats are equally varied and sloppy. So I made this Chinese dish and my dad's signature recipe my own—one that requires far less artistry and skill, using store-bought wrappers and skipping the step of pleating. But that's the thing about family recipes, right? Beyond mastery of technique and regional ingredients, the specific essence of the dishes changes with the maker, even as its essence remains preserved. My dumplings reflect the continuing evolution of Chinese in America—the fluidity of authenticity in Chinese food, and my own identity as proudly American Chinese. It also uses the more Japanese technique of frying followed by steaming, versus boiling then pan-frying, as the thinner wrappers won't stand up to that kind of treatment. A hybrid of Chinese flavors, American ingredient sensibilities and convenience, and Japanese style makes these dumplings part of the continuing evolution of Chinese food in America—a marriage of cultures at the crossroads of so many. This recipe is a taste of a different kind of home. Mine.