FOOD

FOOD Relive your Lunar New Year with DIY dumplings

by Martin Dunphy

If you just celebrated Lunar New Year on Tuesday (February 1), you might have eaten some dumplings.

You might also have asked yourself if you could make them at home, and how difficult that might be.

The answers are “yes” and “not at all”.

The delicious stuffed dough pockets often served for the national holiday in several Asian countries (which is sometimes called Spring Festival) can be steamed, boiled, or fried (when they are often called potstickers) after assembly.

Dumplings (jiaozi in Mandarin) are one of the traditional foods of Lunar New Year (some others are whole steamed fish, spring rolls, and “longevity” noodles). They are usually stuffed with a groundmeat mixture, often pork—though some versions add shrimp and/or finely chopped cabbage, radish, or other ingredients—and served with a soy-based dipping sauce.

The plump pork pillows are usually made the evening of the celebration, for the new year dinner, and are sometimes eaten during both the hour before and the hour after midnight.

Dumplings are considered to be good luck and a harbinger of wealth for the new year, and some people eat prodigious quantities of them during the celebratory meal in order to guarantee prosperity during the coming months.

The Chinese have been making dumplings for at least 1,800 years, especially in the country’s northern regions, where the flexible dough skins are made with wheat flour. (In the south, a more common riceflour covering is often used).

In Taiwan, an omelette-style egg-based dough is sometimes used, which gives the dumpling a golden hue.

What follows is a somewhat generic pork-dumpling recipe that doesn’t require you to make and roll out the dough yourself. Many supermarkets or specialty stores sell packages of refrigerated premade dumpling or wonton wrappers that work perfectly well. (In Vancouver, Powell Street’s Double Happiness Foods supplies both citywide.)

Ingredients for filling

1 cup raw ground pork (or ground turkey or chicken) ½ cup chopped Napa cabbage (or bok choy) ¼ cup green onions (sometimes sold as scallions) 1 tsp sesame oil 1 tbsp soy sauce 1 ½ tsp cornstarch (Note: fine-chopped celery, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and shrimp can be substituted/added to the mixture if care is taken to keep proportions about the same. Minced fresh ginger and/or garlic cloves can also be added for flavour, as can a tablespoon of dry sherry.)

Instructions

Mix the meat and vegetables together in a medium-large bowl until well combined.

Mix the sesame oil and soy sauce in a small separate bowl, then stir in cornstarch until dissolved. (Note: some people prefer to refrigerate the mixed ingredients for a few hours to combine flavours and allow the cabbage to slightly wilt for ease of stuffing, but this is not necessary to make delicious dumplings.)

Pour the liquid over the meat mixture and lightly work it in/toss to coat. (Note: always wash hands after handling raw meat, especially chicken.)

Put a large tablespoon of the filling on the centre of a dumpling or wonton wrapper. Wet your finger in a small bowl of cold water and run it around the wrapper edges to help it seal. Then fold the wrapper over the filling (so the dumpling is a halfmoon shape if a round wrapper is used, or corner-to-corner for a triangle shape if you have square ones) and pinch all the edges so it stays sealed.

Steam in a bamboo steamer basket for eight minutes (place dumplings on a leftover cabbage leaf or some parchment paper to prevent sticking).

Or you can fry them in a pan (do not crowd) with two tablespoons of vegetable oil for one or two minutes, until bottoms are lightly browned. Add one-third of a cup of water and cover tightly, cooking until the water has just about boiled off. Uncover, reduce heat to medium-low, and fry for another minute or two.

Serve with a dipping sauce made with four tablespoons of soy sauce and one and a half tablespoons each of rice wine and rice vinegar. (Chopped green onions can be added to this, as can chili sauce/paste to taste.) Enjoy! g

If you use round store-bought dumpling wrappers, you can fold them in a traditional half-moon shape. Photo by dashu83/Getty Images Plus.

S

avio VOLPE’S NEW CHEF

d THERE’S A NEW HEAD CHEF

making meals over an open fire in one of Vancouver’s most popular restaurants.

Andrea Alridge is settling into this position at Osteria Savio Volpe, which won in the best Italian category in the 2021 Georgia Straight Golden Plate Awards. Osteria Savio Volpe also tied Say Mercy! as the best restaurant in the Fraserhood neighbourhood, as voted by Straight readers.

“Cooking Italian food with open fire is an absolute joy of mine,” Alridge said in a January 31 news release issued by her employer. “It requires much patience, love, and respect for the ingredients. I believe that working with fire truly brings people closer together, the way it bonds a team, the dishes that come from it, and the presence that fills the room from the hearth of the fire.”

Alridge was previously chef de cuisine at Cin Cin Ristorante on Robson Street. Last year, the Vancouver Community College grad competed on Top Chef Canada on Bravo, making it through seven rounds before losing in the “elimination challenge”.

Osteria Savio Volpe’s culinary director, Phil Scarfone (photoraphed above with Alridge), described her as “a natural choice” for the position. “With her sterling reputation, strong work ethic, and friendly demeanour, Andrea is the total package of a leader,” Scarfone said in the release. by Charlie Smith

BOOKS Author Dara Horn digs into uncomfortable terrain

by Charlie Smith

U.S. author and essayist Dara Horn has a simple exercise to demonstrate how little most people know about Jewish culture. At public events, she asks how many of her readers in the audience can name four Nazi concentration camps.

“That’s often something that many readers can do—or just three concentration camps,” Horn told the Straight by phone. “I would then ask those same readers: how many people here can name three Yiddish writers?”

That’s a far tougher question for most people. “My point, of course, is 80 percent of the people who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers,” she said.

That raises troubling follow-up questions. Such as, why do people care so much about how many people died if they really don’t care how people in this famously literary culture actually lived? And why is Jewish identity so often defined by what the outside world did to the Jews rather than what Jews have stood for and accomplished through the millennia?

Horn addresses these issues in her provocative 2021 book of essays, People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present. The title is derived from the opening lines of her 2018 essay on Anne Frank in Smithsonian magazine: “People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much.”

Shortly after the essay was published, a hate-fuelled gunman attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 and wounding six. That prompted a New York Times editor to ask if she would “like to write about dead Jews”.

“As I put it in the book, I became the go-to person for the emerging literary genre of synagogue-shooting op-eds—not a job I applied for,” Horn said wryly.

A scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Horn had already written five novels on themes of Jewish culture, history, and tradition before embarking on People Love Dead Jews. She thinks that people often tell stories about dead Jews to make them feel better about themselves rather than demonstrate genuine curiosity about the lives of Jewish people.

“I now look back and think I was a little naive,” she said. “I think I didn’t appreciate this vast role that Jews—and especially dead Jews—play in the wider not-Jewish world of imagination.”

People Love Dead Jews delves into a wide variety of topics, including why the world is so devoted to Anne Frank but not nearly so much to Jews who wrote about their experiences in concentration camps. The book also reveals how the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin brazenly markets its Jewish history—long after the Jews were displaced—in pursuit of tourist dollars while offering little insights into their lives building the community. Horn pointed out that a museum about former Jewish residents in Harbin is one of many examples of a tourist-industry concept called “Jewish heritage sites”.

“This term is a brilliant marketing ploy because it sounds so much better than property seized from murdered or expelled Jews,” Horn says. “Like, who wants to go to that? ‘Jewish heritage sites’ sounds so benign.”

Horn’s book also addresses antisemitism in Shakespeare’s work—and her 10-year-old son’s reaction to it—as well as modern-day attacks on the Jewish community in America even after all the efforts to educate people about the Holocaust.

Along the way, she has been influenced by University of Chicago historian David Nirenberg. He argued in his 2013 book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition that western civilization defined itself in opposition to Judaism. “He traces this not just through Christianity and Islam but also in the Enlightenment through to, you know, Communism,” Horn said.

The Straight asked Horn what aspects of Jewish culture and identity are overlooked by broader society. She first mentioned “the idea of independent thinking”, as well as the “integrity of having your own civilization”.

Then she said that there’s a widespread misconception that average people only learned to read after Johannes Gutenberg created a printing press in the 15th century.

“It’s a lie,” Horn said, “because Jewish communities have had universal male literacy for, like, a thousand years before

In People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present, author Dara Horn pushes back against a societal view of Jews as a symbol rather than real people. Photo by Michael Priest. the printing press—at least. Poor Jewish kids in 12th-century Yemen knew how to read.” By the 1700s and 1800s, she added, Jews were at the vanguard in the movement toward creating liberal democracies. Then there’s the Jewish appreciation for ambiguity as reflected in the Talmud.

“Participating in an intellectual tradition means being able to hold multiple ideas even with contradictions,” she said. “That’s a huge part of Jewish civilization.”

High-school history books might have a chapter on the Holocaust, Horn noted, but there’s almost never anything said about how Judaism has been a “counterculture” running through the history of the world. Through the ages, Jews didn’t conform to the status quo by sharing the beliefs of their neighbours. And for that, they paid a very high price.

“What do you mean when you say ‘diversity’?” Horn asked. “What does it mean to live in a pluralistic society? Those are the questions you don’t have to ask if you’re just [saying] ‘Jews are just this symbol.’ That’s what I’m pushing back against in this book.” g

The 2022 Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival: the virtual edition runs from February 6 to 10. Dara Horn will speak about People Love Dead Jews at 1 p.m. on February 6 with David Baddiel, author of Jews Don’t Count.