Wrap me in your doughy embrace
The way a dumpling party works is: everyone brings dumplings. Sometimes they’re homemade (which necessitates an anticipatory dumpling folding party ahead of time), sometimes they have some cultural or family significance to the guest. Sometimes they’re a bag of gushers that someone grabbed last minute and snuck in with a technical pass. We mostly cook the dumplings on the spot, so the stovetop is overcrowded with steamers, woks, and pots of boiling water all night. Every time a new batch of dumplings comes off the stove, people cheer and those who ate too many at the beginning find the space inside themselves to squeeze in one more. Black vinegar pools with sour cream and chutney on small plates.
Over the six years I’ve held a holiday dumpling party, we’ve seen potstickers, pierogis, pelmeni, ravioli, tortellini, soup dumplings, vareniki, pizza rolls, shumai, samosas, a cat food dumpling (for Laika), homemade poptarts, and the aforementioned gushers which we cooked in a bamboo steamer very late at night. Some friends who had never made dumplings before have now learned their grandmother’s potsticker or pierogi recipe by heart. People feel so proud of their creations and excited about sharing them. It’s everything I love about food, basically. The creativity, the collaboration in a shared vision, the exploration of culture, and a really great party.
Sometimes I worry about losing what I love about food by professionalizing it. Culinary school confers a kind of legitimacy on its graduates. That’s partly why I’m there; my confidence has grown enormously through getting comfortable in a commercial kitchen and being able to double-check my assumptions with teachers. But I keep reminding myself that I’m not there to learn the “right” ways of doing things. The right way to cook is whatever makes you and the people eating the food happy and healthy. Women, in particular, have been putting in the kind of hours that I spend in the kitchen as unpaid labor since forever, and it would be extremely arrogant to assume that I’m learning more in school than homemakers who practice just as much. In the last year, most everyone I know has been picking up cooking practice, so we’re all getting better together.
So as I find my place in the culinary profession, I want to keep bringing it back to home cooking. Even if I’m actually doing the cooking, I don’t think I’ll ever aim for the aloof magic of a fancy restaurant, but for something that inspires people to try things out at home themselves. I don’t have to look further than Archestratus’ cookbook clubs or Jenn de la Vega’s Make 100 events for examples of drawing people into the creative, giving aspect of cooking. And of course, the Annual Dumpling Party, which I hope will continue to wrap my soul in dough and warmth.
Today is the 6th Annual Dumpling Party, and we’re making it work with some modifications. A small group has made dumplings over the last week and we just met up in the park near my house to exchange Ziploc bags of labeled, frozen dumplings. Tonight we’ll heat them up and have a dinner Zoom to acknowledge all the great and delicious work. There are momos and soup dumplings, a flavor called “We Miss KBBQ” with bulgogi sauce that'll pair well with a kimchi one, samosas, and some with zucchini and jalapeños. It's the first year all of them are homemade.
What I’m reading
Conversation with Alicia Kennedy and Eric Rivera, of Addo in Seattle (sign up for Alicia’s newsletter to read the full interview)
How has the idea of what a chef is evolved in your brain, if at all?
Yeah, it was very different, because the point of view was, ‘Get people here. And then once they’re here, show them what you can do, and then interact with them all over.’ So, for me, that doesn’t exist anymore. And having a tasting menu and having a chef’s counter, all that shit sounds fancy ’cause it was, but there’s a lot of other stuff we were doing at the time that was lower spectrum, lower price point stuff that was just, ‘Get people through the door.’
But now it’s very different, because you’re almost flying blind every day. There’s things that people want that I figured out; it wouldn’t have existed before the pandemic. So, it’s made me more kind of jump into their house, figure out what’s going on with them, kind of understand and talk to them and go like, ‘What do you want?’
And basically, what I’ve positioned myself as is being your personal chef. And that’s kind of the relationship I have now, rather than imposing what we do here. It’s the other way around. Now it’s going like, ‘What do you need?’ Which is cool.
I like the image of a chef “jumping into people’s houses” when it doesn’t literally mean going into their homes to cook for them. Eric Rivera has been extremely creative in the way he’s using his restaurant space (Alicia goes on to mention that he fried a customers’ potatoes for him, because, well, he had a fryer and the customer didn’t). I recommended his sazon and adobo in the gift guide a few weeks back. I like to imagine that the role of a community-oriented restaurant is to rise to the needs or desires of its customers rather than the other way around, but I know in practice that it’s difficult. It certainly doesn’t scale well. Trying out “600 variables of offerings,” as Eric says they have at Addo, doesn’t work if you have more than one restaurant location, unless each one functions autonomously enough to fill different spaces. But watching the places that are making this work is inspiring.