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IT STARTED, AS MANY INNOCENT things do, with cheese.
Two pints of fresh pillowy Vermont ricotta, about to go
bad. I calculated I had a day to salvage them. My son doesn’t
eat lasagna. (It’s a combination of ingredients, and he is a
purist.) But a quick search yielded a recipe for ricotta
gnocchi: the simplest kind of dumpling. I mixed egg yolks,
ricotta, Parmesan, salt, and a smattering of flour, and was
rewarded with tiny, savory pasta cushions, light as air.
The following morning, my attention was drawn to a shelf
of dusty cookbooks containing recipes involving fresh
dough. As a rule, I avoid the stuff. When I mix flour with
water, I end up with glue. Dried pasta is the best invention
of humankind. Why mess with perfection?
But the simplicity of my ricotta gnocchi left me with an
itch. I love dumplings, in all varieties. I love potato gnocchi
with Genovese pesto. I adore Northern Chinese jiaozi. (I
ate eight a day for a whole year in New York in my 20s, at
the Eldridge Street storefront that now houses the famed
Vanessa’s Dumpling House.) I love Piedmontese agnolotti,
Russian pelmeni, Ukrainian pierogi, Japanese gyoza. I love
har gow from China, Turkish manti, Nepali momos, kreplach
from all of Eastern Europe.
I’ve always judged these too complicated to make—but
if my ricotta gnocchi were technically dumplings, perhaps
I’d been wrong?
I boarded a train bound for New York City, dumpling
capital of North America. Dumplings are part of nearly
every cuisine in the world—oddly, other than French, which
never figured out noodles the way other cultures did—and
Italian and Chinese dumplings are the apex of dumpling
excellence. My plan: I would study under experts whose
dumplings I hoped to master. As the sunlight-spotted Hudson
River rushed by, I plunged into reading and found that,
according to Harold McGee’s essential On Food and Cooking,
some form of dough product was made in China as early as
200 B.C.E. By 300 C.E., one finds an “Ode to Bing”—bing
are today a kind of Chinese flatbread—that describes the
making of dough from flour and water or broth and resulting
in a mixture “soft as silk floss in the springtime.” Jiaozi are
mentioned in documents from before 700 C.E. Apparently
there are even dumpling fossils dating to the ninth century.
I disembarked at Penn Station and quickly made my way
to Misi in Brooklyn, Missy Robbins’s newest temple to
pasta. Misi is home to what I believe to be the best stuffed
Italian dumpling in the city—though it goes by a rather
confusing term: occhi. Occhi means eyes, and Robbins traces
it to an off-menu special she tasted once at a trattoria in
Luca, Italy. It is a faultless dumpling: pliant marigold-yellow
dough full to bulging with sheep and cow ricottas, with nary
an atom of air between. (Air bubbles both increase the chance
of a rupture and occupy real estate
PLAIN AND SIMPLE
DUMPLINGS ARE PART OF NEARLY EVERY CUISINE IN THE WORLD.
RACHEL CAMPBELL, HEATING INSTRUCTIONS, 2016.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 211
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