Chinese Cuisine-Present: Xiaolong Bao

Xiaolong Bao 小笼包. This dish has a special place on the table of my last meal.

The quintessential snack/delicacy of Su style cooking. Also called soup dumplings, xiaolong bao are actually just one kind of soup dumpling. The actual soup dumpling in Chinese is tang bao 汤包, which means, well, soup dumpling - or to be more precise, soup 汤 and package 包.

The xiaolong in xiaolong bao refers to the steamer used to cooking the dumplings. Xiao 小 means small and long 笼 means a steamer basket, although both the character and sound of long is similiar to the word for dragon or 龙. This is deliberate, as the steam coming off a long steamer basket is being compared to the steam made by a fire-breathing dragon. These kinds of dragons are not to be confused with not the much more powerful and wondrous Water Dragon(s) which brings rain.

For the etymologists among you (I know you're out there and not to be confused with entymologist - the last one of those I met ended up being a selfish SOB and it had nothing with his unhealthy love of ants), also note that the only difference between the characters for steamer basket and dragon are the presence of the radical for bamboo 竹, which has been condensed to fit on top of 笼. This is also deliberate as the steam baskets were - and stil largely are - made of bamboo.

My first encoutter with xiaolong bao came during the second year I was living in China. I was a visitor scholar at the time in Nanjing and I was researching my dissertation. For about three months straight the routine was set - wake up in the morning for a run at the Nanjing University or Nanjing Normal University track, pick up a few long (you order by the steamer basket which can contain 8-10 individual dumplings) of xiaolong bao from the neighborhood hole in the wall and spent the rest of the day either researching, translating, or writing. I look back fondly upon those times, which should say a lot about how wonderful and life changing xiaolong bao were. Otherwise, I'd be talking about how absolutely miserable that period in my life was.

There are many places in Maryland that claim to serve xiaolong bao but until recently I wasn't able to find one that made it correctly. The most common error is the lack of soup in the dumpling, which pretty much defeats the purpose but hey, I'm not the chef.

The one place I can reliably get xiaolong bao in Maryland is Bob's Shanghai Cafe in Rockville. I'll be covering them in a future blog post - stay tuned.

#ChinaPresent #China