The Enduring Dumpling at the Shakespeare Club
The Ghanian kenkey made with fermented white corn and wrapped in dried corn husks. Photo credit: Warmglow, wikimedia commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0.
submitted by Joan Gaughan, Shakespeare Club
Dumplings can hardly be called haute cuisine. Nor would one readily associate Shakespeare with dumplings but, as Franci van der Schalie pointed out in her presentation to the Club on March 10, dumplings were no doubt a staple of Shakespeare’s audiences and perhaps even of the Bard himself.
The exact origin of dumplings is a bit obscure, but they seem to have appeared about the second century A.D. when a Chinese physician, Zhang Zhongjing, returning home during a harsh winter, encountered people who were weakened not only from famine but also from frostbite, especially on their ears. Lore tells us that Zhang Zhongjing made a simple dough of water, salt, and wheat flour and flattened it into circles with his hands. He then placed healing herbs and spices on to the circles and closed them by pinching them in such a way that they resembled jiaozi, that is, little ears. He then boiled them in a delicious mutton broth. The heat from the spices and the medicinal ingredients of the dumplings in addition to the nutritious meat broth strengthened the people enough that their earaches and frostbite disappeared, and the jiaozi became a symbol of good fortune.
So what is a dumpling? In a way, it still is a “little ear” that is, a lump of moistened dough made of wheat or potato flour or any starchy ingredient that is then filled with meat, spices, vegetables, cheese, fruits (as in apple dumplings), sweets – or nothing at all – and boiled. Regardless of the filling, or lack thereof, it is the boiling that makes it a dumpling
Because the “little ears” were easy to carry and needed no oven to make, their presence is a visible history of human migration around the world. Their very adaptability to locally available ingredients and indigenous customs has given rise to unique variations, from the kenkey of Ghana to the gnocchi of Italy, the German spatzle,, the pastele of Puerto Rico and your grandmother’s dumplings in her chicken soup. However, wherever, and in whatever form we find it, “a dumpling by any other name will taste just as comforting” to rich and poor, old and young alike. And as Charles Lamb noted, “A man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings.”
The Shakespeare Club was founded in 1897. It meets twice monthly from late September to mid May in Manchester to enjoy informative presentations by members on varying and fascinating topics. If you are interested in learning more about the Shakespeare Club, email Joan Gaughan at allgaughan@yahoo.com.
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