Mandu-beop (Dumpling Method)

History

Mandu — filled dumplings — are generally believed to have entered Korea from the Yuan dynasty in the fourteenth century, during Goryeo, when Mongol contact relaxed Buddhist restraints on eating meat. The name descends from Chinese mantou (饅頭) and is cognate with the manti dumplings carried along the Silk Road; a Goryeo folk song, Ssanghwajeom, even describes a dumpling shop run by a foreigner, probably of Central Asian origin. Until the mid-Joseon period the dish was also called sanghwa (쌍화) or gyoja, and it long remained a northern specialty of Pyongan and Hamgyong, where the wheat and buckwheat for the wrappers were grown. Jang Gye-hyang's Eumsik dimibang (c.1670), the oldest surviving Korean-language cookbook, is therefore an early vernacular witness rather than the dish's origin. Her method rolls a thin wrapper of buckwheat — or wheat prepared like sanghwa-bun dough — around a filling of pheasant (saengchi) stir-fried in soy and oil, or beef when pheasant is lacking, plus a meatless version of radish and pine, oak and pyogo mushrooms. It is seasoned with pine nuts, black pepper and cheoncho, then dipped in vinegar-soy with ginger juice — no chili, which had not yet reached the region. The same section preserves one of the earliest concrete recipes for the fermented steamed bun sanghwa.

Ingredients

• buckwheat flour
• radish
• pheasant
• beef
• soy sauce
• sesame oil
• pine nuts
• black pepper
• cheoncho (Sichuan pepper)
• ginger
• garlic
• shiitake, songi and seogi mushrooms
• wheat flour

Instructions

1. Mill buckwheat as fine as good noodle flour and sift it through ramie or silk cloth.
2. Cook a little of the flour into a thin gruel-like paste; knead the rest of the flour soft with it.
3. On the board, form dumpling wrappers about hazelnut-sized.
4. For the filling: boil radish very soft and mince it fine without lumps; chop tender pheasant flesh; fry together in soy sauce and oil; season with pine nuts, black pepper and cheoncho (Sichuan pepper).
5. Fill the wrappers and shape the dumplings.
6. Drop a few at a time into a small pot, boil just to doneness, and serve one portion at a time with ginger juice in soy sauce.
7. If no pheasant: knead sinew-free beef in soy and oil, then mince it (kneading first is essential, or it clumps). Do not add mung-bean flour to the dumplings.
8. For a meatless filling: boil radish soft, mince shiitake/songi/seogi fine, add plenty of oil, pound in pine nuts and fry in soy sauce.
9. Wheat flour may be used instead — milled clean like sanghwa flour and prepared just as for buckwheat dumplings, served with vinegar-soy and ginger juice.
10. Garlic may substitute for ginger if needed, but its lingering smell makes it inferior.