There is wonderfully community quality when the dumplings are made from scratch at home. This is something I learned very early on my childhood, and I carefully watched the hand-chop ingredients of my grandmother and my mother and mother and mixed the boiling water into the flour with the long wooden chopsticks to form the dough dough. We collected it around the kitchen table, everyone with their designated task – submission, formatting, filling, crimping – to make dozens and dozens of dumplings to feed the whole family. I practiced making play-doh dumplings until I became proficient enough to do the real business, and finally it was good enough to be a teenager when I was a teenager. What the experience gave me was that both the dumplings and the making process, no matter where I was in the world.
The next 17 dumplings from all over the world may differ in their taste, interpretation and technique, but each speaks the universal language of dumplings – warm, invitation and reassuring. They are great with their friends and family or family, or even with themselves.