A World of Dumplings: Filled Dumplings, Pockets, and Little Pies from Around the Globe [Paperback]

Brian Yarvin's title A World of Dumplings might conjure up images of chicken and dumplings for some, or soup for others, but it's about a much wider range of foods than that. He uses the word to refer to nearly any form of filled dough treat, savory or sweet, whether baked, fried, steamed, poached, or boiled.

A brief introduction provides some tips and hints and introduces you to the wide range of treats waiting for you in the pages to come. The first major section offers up recipes from Asian countries, including Japan (mmmm, Gyoza!), Korea (Mandu!), China (everything from Wontons to Shanghai-Style Soup Dumplings), Vietnam (Spring Rolls), Thailand, and India (Samosas!). The recipes I mentioned by name are only a sampling of what's on offer, and the book also includes recipes for the wrappers as well as a handful of dipping sauces. Each regional section also includes interesting notes on how or why a particular type of dumpling is made the way it is.

Dumplings are presented from Central Asia and the Middle East, including an exquisite recipe for sweet walnut fritters that I couldn't get enough of, as well as simple and delicious chickpea pies. There are dumplings from Russia and Eastern Europe, Western Europe (primarily Italy), and the Americas.

The flavors in these recipes are uniformly delightful, and the photos definitely help the cook to figure out how to assemble these wonderful tidbits. However, the directions did occasionally confuse me a bit. Take, for instance, the Samsa, or Sweet Walnut Fritters. The dough gets rolled out into a sheet that is 12 x 24 inches. The directions say to cut the dough into six-inch squares, and the recipe says it makes 20 of the dumplings. The closest I could come was three-inch squares, which made 18. That certainly worked well enough, but this kind of confusion definitely makes the book a little harder to use in places.

I do highly recommend the use of a pasta machine with those recipes that specify it. The author notes in his introduction that it makes life a lot easier, and I must concur with that. We were certainly able to make a recipe without the specified machine, but it would have been much easier with it.

If you're a dumpling fiend as I am, I highly recommend this cookbook. The results are delicious, there's a huge range of delightful recipes to choose from of all kinds, the photos walk you through the difficult steps, and even the rough spots in the directions are minimal.

`A World of Dumplings' by Brian Yarvin is exactly the kind of passionate treatment of a specialized culinary subject we like to find from `little presses' like `The Countryman Press' up to and including former upstart (and now giant) 10 Speed Press. Yarvin is neither a chef like Rick Bayless nor an established culinary journalist or writer such as Paula Wolfert or Claudia Roden. But Yarvin has what appears to be a consuming interest and passion for his subject which has produced a book which is at the top of its class as a survey of dumpling recipes.
The very first thing Yarvin does right is that he covers the whole world, as promised, but touches of few if any types of food which are NOT easily recognized as dumplings.
My very first interest was to see how he would approach that very special Pennsylvania Dutch contribution to world dumplings, the baked apple dumpling. As it happens, Yarvin lives and works just across the Delaware from Dumpling Central, in western New Jersey, so he was in an excellent position to do lots of first hand research, and that is exactly what he did. As a very amateur student of this dish, I have tried several different recipes from PA Dutch cookbooks, and I have eaten many a sample at local restaurants and fairs. And, I can attest that Yarvin has captured this dish in all its sweet and spicy and doughy glory. This is NOT diet food, kiddies, and Yarvin has applied the sugar, lard, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg at all the right places. Even better, he has not assumed, as many of these PA Dutch cookbooks do, that you know the basics of preparing dough. His recipe is more detailed than anything I have seen coming out of Lancaster County from Best Books!
My second check on Yarvin's recipes was to compare his Steamed Chinese Pork Dumplings (shu mai) to a recipe by an oriental culinary specialist, Ellen Leong Blonder in `Dim Sum, The Art of Chinese Tea Lunch' and I found again that Yarvin again gives us a recipe which is as good or better than one available from specialists in the area.
My third check was to compare his empanada recipe to Rick Bayless' recipe in his authoritative `Authentic Mexican' book and also to the equally authoritative Diane Kennedy's `The Essential Cuisines of Mexico'. Here, I found a somewhat puzzling result. Bayless and Kennedy give two different recipes for the empanada wrapper, with Bayless using only wheat flour and Kennedy using only masa (corn flour). The simple explanation is that Bayless is describing Empanadas de Picadillo from northern Mexico and Kennedy is describing Empanadas de Requeson from southern Mexico. Yarvin splits the difference with his single recipe and creates a wrapper with about ¾ wheat flour and ¼ corn flour. So, Yarvin is not giving us ethnically precise empanadas; however, just like his apple dumpling recipe and his shu mai recipe, his empanada recipe is as detailed and illuminating (or better) than any of the ethnic sources. And, Yarvin gives us five different recipes for fillings using the one `universal' empanada wrapper recipe.
The story of empanadas is repeated for virtually all of the world's varieties of dumplings, from Italian raviolis to Polish Pierogis to Russian Varenicki to Indian Samosas. Every major dumpling genre has its variations which change from region to region and, if you are to believe many writers, from household to household, with everyone believing theirs are the best.
Yarvin adds to his recipes some great stories describing his search for some of these recipes, plus some very nice condiments, such as the dipping sauces for the Chinese dim sum dumplings and pasta sauces for the Italian galaxy of filled pastas and onion marmalade condiments for the eastern European dumplings.
Very few books of this type have ever disappointed me, and this one is better than most. If your interest is exclusively in dumplings from Italy or Mexico or the Ukraine or China, this book may not be the most authentic source, but if you are a foodie omnivore and relish the notion of experimenting with all sorts of dumplings, Yarvin is your man. Of course, if you are in love with Dutch apple dumplings, the recipe for that dessert may be worth the price of the book.

The author gives great recipes, which one would hope for, or expect. What makes this book so interesting is that he also includes offbeat, fun, sometimes funnier than you would ever expect, stories about his adventures in putting the recipes and the book together. From a Polish dumpling shop, to posting a flyer seeking help with simosas, to two elderly peopling fighing in a diner, I was laughing, smiling, AND learning.