Dumplings(3) (元宵 Yuanxiao)

Yuanxiao is a special dumpling in China for the Lantern Festival (the 15th night of the 1st lunar month). It is a "ball" made of glutinous rice flour.

Yuanxiao, it is said, made its debut in the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420 A.D.) and became popular during the Tang and Song periods (7th to 13th century), but not under its present name. The Notes of the Year in Hubei, a book by a 10th century scholar, mentioned "bean-paste-filled cakes" which were made on the 15th day of the 1st lunar month and, in another context, "floating cakes in thin gruel prepared at the middle of the first moon".

As the 15th night of the New Year was later called "Shangyuan" and the "Yuanxiao" festival, so the dumplings came to be known by the name of the festival.

Yuanxiao dumplings fall into two categories.

One is those without fillings. A suitable amount or water is mixed into glutinous rice flour to make dough, which is then shaped by hand into small "solid balls". The balls or dumplings are boiled in sweetened water and, when cooked, are served in bowls. They can also be boiled in plain water and then sprinkled with sugar in the serving bowl. A third way of preparation is to cook them with dried longan pulp, candied dates or jujubes and similar ingredients to make a kind of porridge of assorted balls. Sweetened with sugar and osmanthus flowers, it makes an excellent dessert.

Another category of dumplings is those with fillings, which may be either sweet or salty in taste. For the sweet variety, the filling may be sugar, walnut meat, sesame, osmanthus flowers, rose petals, sweetened tangerine peel, bean or jujube paste, used alone or in combination. The salty variety can be filled with mincemeat, certain vegetables or a mixture of both. In either case, the materials are minced and well mixed with flavour some seasonings.

The way to make stuffed dumplings also varies between the north and the south. The usual method followed in southern provinces is to shape the dough of rice flour into balls, make a hole in each and insert the filling inside, close the hole and smooth out the surface by rolling the ball between the hands. In the north, where sweet and non-meat stuffing is normally used, people pressed the fillings into hardened cores, dip them slightly in water and roll them in a flat basket containing dry glutinous rice flour. A layer of the flour will be stuck on the fillings, which are dipped again in water and rolled again in the rice flour. And so it goes on snowballing until the dumplings grow to the desired size.

Yuanxiao dumplings must be boiled in the right way. First bring a pot of water to a boil on strong fire. Drop in the dumplings gently and, when they float up on the water a few minutes later, keep them in the pot for a few more minutes to make the inside well cooked. But at this stage, the fire must be reduced, for dumplings boiled in rolling water may burst open. To make sure that this does not happen, some cold water may be added little by little into the pot to keep the water simmering instead of boiling.