On a recent Saturday morning in Paris, I made a life-changing discovery. It came in the frozen aisle of an Asian supermarket: you can buy premade dumpling wrappers. Take a moment to think about the implications of this. Chinese shrimp wontons? Ukrainian potato varenyky? Italian veal ravioli? You’re halfway there before you’ve even chopped an onion (as long as you’re not precious about using exactly the right dough for each recipe).
Since then, I’ve fallen into a full-blown dumpling rabbit hole, my nights spent on YouTube, watching grandmothers sitting in circles, pinching dough. So many shapes. So many techniques. Team inward pleats or outward?
Columbia University Press has just published The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America. But clearly someone should also write The Long Arc of Putting Things in Dough: A Transcultural History. Because what does it say about humanity that all around the globe, at various points in history, people have invented some version of a delicious thing wrapped in dough?
Perhaps we all secretly long to be dumplings; there is certainly something reassuring about being enclosed. The French philosopher Claire Marin calls this a nostalgia for our “lost envelopment” – a longing to return to that primordial experience of being fully embraced in the womb.
Indeed, how fortunate is a filling’s existence: held, knowing it is exactly where it belongs. Desired, yet protected. And entirely individual, but never alone; dumplings are herd beings. Plus, they’re cute. So much so that squishy mystery dumplings have become the latest trend toy. The Labubu is so 2025.
Perhaps we need to go back to the stone age to understand the worldwide dumpling craze.
In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the American novelist Ursula K Le Guin suggested that our narrative of human history may be badly skewed. We picture early humans as men chasing bison. Yet the first human tool may have been a basket, not a spear. Gathering probably provided most of the calories; hunting was more often a hobby to kill time. And the fact that we say “hunter-gatherers” rather than “gatherer-hunters” is probably another vestige of the patriarchy.
“It is a human thing to do,” Le Guin writes, “to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible or beautiful, into a bag … and then take it home with you.”
Dumplings, those lovely edible containers, take this human instinct and make it culinary.
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Whatever the reasons for the dumpling’s global triumph, it fills me with hope. Every time I eat Afghan mantu, Argentinian empanadas or Austrian kasnudeln, I feel that these little envelopes are trying to teach me a small lesson in universalism.
Forget the clash of civilisations. Dumplings, whether you like them or not, are the ultimate proof of our common humanity.
