With a history of more than 1,800 years, dumplings are a classic Chinese food, and a traditional dish eaten on Chinese New Year's Eve, widely popular in China, especially in North China.
Chinese dumplings can be made to look like Chinese silver ingots (which are not bars, but boat-shaped, oval, and turned up at the two ends). Legend has it that the more dumplings you eat during the New Year celebrations, the more money you can make in the New Year.
Dumplings generally consist of minced meat and finely-chopped vegetables wrapped in a thin and elastic dough skin. Popular fillings are minced pork, diced shrimp, fish, ground chicken, beef, and vegetables. They can be cooked by boiling, steaming, frying or baking.
How they're made: Almost all Chinese people can make dumplings. First they mix the dough, second make the dough into round "wrappers" with a rolling pin, third fill the wrappers with stuffing, fourth pinch the "wrapper" together into the desired shape, and fifth cook them.
Different Dumpling Fillings Have Different Meanings
Chinese don't eat Chinese sauerkraut dumplings at Spring Festival, because it implies a poor and difficult future. On New Year's Eve it is a tradition to eat dumplings with cabbage and radish, implying that one's skin will become fair and one's mood will become gentle.
How to Make LUCKY Dumplings
When making dumplings there should be a good number of pleats. If you make the junction too flat, it is thought to purport poverty.
Some Chinese put a white thread inside a dumpling, and the one who eats that dumpling is supposed to possess longevity. Sometimes a copper coin is put in a dumpling, and the one who eats it is supposed to become wealthy.
Dumplings should be arranged in lines instead of circles, because circles of dumplings are supposed to mean one's life will go round in circles, never going anywhere.
Lucky Saying for Eating Dumplings
Zhāo cái jìn bǎo (招财进宝): 'Bringing in wealth and treasure' — a felicitous wish for making money and amassing a fortune.
Very well written and enjoyable as you have used creative language so that the reader becomes interested in this topic. I never knew so much about Dumplings. In future I will to try and eat as many dumplings as I can over the New Year Festival.