Chicago Dim Sum by Ruth Paget
Eating Chinese dim sum was one of the money hacks I used to lead an urbane existence in Chicago on a budget as a young woman.
On Sunday mornings, my husband Laurent and I would leave our apartment in Marina City and walk up Michigan Avenue to Water Tower Place Shopping Center. Our destination was Rizzoli Bookstore. At Rizzoli’s we would buy Le Monde and Financial Times newspapers. I would sometimes buy art books or novels by Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie.
We would check out upcoming movies on the way out and walk down to the Chinese restaurant with dim sum tea lunch, which is what I think is the Shanghai Terrace of the Peninsula Hotel now. I liked the circular booths in the restaurant.
We ordered fragrant jasmine tea to start as waitresses wheeled carts of steaming dim sum by our table. We pointed at many of them, and waitresses noted our choices with a Chinese stamp and wrote how many we chose.
There is a very good book for ordering dim sum called Dim Sum Field Guide by Carolyn Phillips. Her book is not a cookbook, but has line drawings of various dim sum, dim sum tea etiquette, Chinese characters for the various dim sum, alphabet spellings for Mandarin character pronunciations, and dim sum ingredients.
I used the cookbook Dim Sum and Other Chinese Street Food to find ingredients used in three dim sum “dumplings” that you can order in almost all dim sum restaurants:
*jiaozu – ravioli-like coin purse pasta made with minced pork, Napa cabbage, bok choy, and garlic chives
*Siu Mai – egg dough cups that are squeezed and twirled before steaming that are made with minced pork and shrimp, bamboo shoots, black mushrooms, and water chestnuts
*Har Gau – Crescent shaped dumplings stuffed with minced shrimp, water chestnuts, pork fat, and sherry
Leung’s cookbook shows hot to set up bamboo steamers in a wok over boiling water as well.
Pre-made dim sum would be welcome to many people who are working at home, because you would just have to steam them or heat them up in an oven. H Mart in California just might have all you need to set up dim sum tea lunches from tea to chopsticks.
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
