Cai's Steamed Dumplings

蔡记蒸饺 was founded by Cai Shijun (蔡士俊), a native of Changyuan in Henan — a county long noted for supplying cooks — who in the late Qing worked as a kitchen-hand in the Beijing palace. After the 1911 revolution ended the dynasty he left the palace and opened a small eatery outside Beijing's Qianmen selling steamed dumplings and chicken-shred wonton; around 1919 he brought the trade to Zhengzhou, opening a wonton house first on Xi'er Street (西二街), and the business later moved to the busier Dehua Street. Because the founder had cooked in the palace kitchen the dumplings drew custom on that reputation, and the house came to be called 京都老蔡记. It is the senior of Zhengzhou's 'Three Old Records' (老三记) — 老蔡记蒸饺, 合记烩面 and 葛记焖饼 — and 蔡记蒸饺 was listed as a Zhengzhou municipal intangible cultural heritage in 2008. (Accounts differ slightly on the year the Zhengzhou shop opened, but place it around 1919.)

Picked up hot from the basket, a dumpling is shaped like a willow leaf or a slim crescent, its many fine folds ridged along the top, the thin skin almost translucent and glossy. The first bite breaks the wrapper to a small rush of savoury juice, then the firm, springy pork filling, and under it a faint clean resin scent from the pine needles the basket was lined with. The skin is thin but strong enough not to tear or go gummy. Dipped in vinegar, the dumpling turns brighter and less rich. Done well it is juicy and the folds neat and even; done badly the skin is thick and doughy or splits and loses its juice, the filling is dry and crumbly or smells too strongly of mutton-fat or scallion, and the pleating is coarse.

The wrapper is the craft. Mixing scalded dough (烫面, made with boiling water, which gelatinises some of the starch and breaks gluten so the skin is soft and slightly translucent and does not toughen when steamed) with unscalded cold-water dough (死面, which keeps its gluten and gives strength) gives a wrapper that is thin and tender yet strong enough to hold the juice without splitting — the repeated kneading develops just enough gluten for that balance. The filling is pork blended roughly three-tenths fat to seven-tenths lean, seasoned and beaten with water (打水) so it absorbs liquid that, on steaming, the rendered fat and the dissolved meat proteins hold as the inner pool of juice; too lean and it goes dry, too fat and it turns greasy. The bamboo basket and its lining of pine needles let the steam pass freely so the skins set fast and stay non-sticky, and lend the faint resin scent. Steam too long and the skins slump and the juice cooks away; too short and the pork is underdone.