![]() ![]() ![]() I’d never seen anyone make siopao by hand-not my late mamang (grandmother) or any of my titas (aunts) or my mom. And, while I’m an avid home cook, I’m practically a dough virgin. But siopao dough needs to proof three times over the course of a day. I’d spent the morning making two batches: the yeast hadn’t activated in the first one the second was perfect. He’d watched me slog all day over this dough. My husband looked over at me while reading a book to our son. No one had told me that closing a dumpling required such focus. I was hovering over the island in my kitchen, trying to be as present as possible. “P inch, pinch, pinch,” I mumbled to myself after four already-failed siopaos unravelled before my eyes. The History of Food in Canada Is the History of Colonialism.Why My Mother’s Cassava Pie Is More than a Comfort Food.In Defence of Garlic in a Jar: How Food Snobs Almost Ruined My Love of Cooking. ![]() Siopao, in fact, might be the way that you and I can better understand Filipino food. This steamed dumpling, relatively unknown outside the Filipino community, tells the story of our history through its exact parts: the bun-Chinese ties the filling-Spanish conquistadors the means by which we eat it-American culture. Siopao is hard to understand because Philippine food culture-forever changed by our history as a colony of both Spain and America-is hard to understand. In Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture, the late Filipino food historian Doreen Fernandez explained it best when she wrote, “Philippine foodways have been difficult even for Filipinos to understand, so variegated they are, coming as they do from different cultural strains. . . . When one asks today, therefore, ‘What is Philippine food?’ the answer can be neither brief nor simple.” Why does a Chinese bun filled with a meat dish-originally inherited from Spain and sold frozen in plastic packs in the Little Manilas around the globe-exist mostly within the confines of Filipino homes and mouths? But ask even the most avid, non-Filipino restaurant goer and food enthusiast in my city, Toronto, or places like New York, Chicago, or Boston, and it’s likely they’ve never even heard the name-pronounced shoh-pao. “I went through a phase as a kid where I only ate the filling,” wrote one food blogger, whose page I scoured for siopao-making tips. Most Filipinos, both in the Philippines and abroad, have memories of eating siopao as children. “We’d buy a dozen with fortunes and another dozen discards, broken cookies left flat and unfolded, just to eat alongside our. Having grown up in a family of six children, she wrote about how she and her older siblings would sneak in through the back door of a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco’s Chinatown to watch the assembly line while her mom waited at the bakery to pick up baozi-“what we call siopao,” Dimayuga wrote. W hen chef Angela Dimayuga published Filipinx: Heritage Recipes from the Diaspora, in late 2021, her recipe for siopao was accompanied by a story from her childhood. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. Excerpted from What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings, edited by John Lorinc. ![]()
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