“Here’s a fun fact: Every single person’s dumpling-prints are distinct,” Professor Miranda Brown says, her hands working golden dough. “The marks left by pinching the edge of the dumpling into place—they’re like handwriting.” Some people can look at a plate of handmade dumplings and know, by the imprints left on the dough, exactly how many people folded them.
As she speaks, there are five people folding dumplings: three students, an alum, and Brown, the Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker Collegiate Professor of Chinese Studies, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and director of LSA’s Honors Program. Brown is standing in a kitchen near campus, rolling out tiny wheat circles that will be shaped into plump bundles of lamb seasoned with cumin, and explaining why she’s using that particular meat in the recipe today.
“About 100 years ago,” Brown says, spooning lamb into the circle of dough in her palm, “Chinese people ate more lamb than pork, but then various ethnic policies standardized lamb and beef diets for Muslim Chinese, and pork for Han Chinese. And a lot of Han Chinese people in the north now don’t even realize that their ancestors 100 years ago were big lamb eaters.”
There’s more to say on the provenance of this batch of dumplings’ ingredients, and many stories about the variety of dumplings found across regions and centuries—stories she shares in lectures on ocean trade routes, religious conversions, imperialist conquest, cultural meeting points, and nomadic civilizations—but now it’s time to place the dumplings she and her students have assembled in a bamboo steamer and cook them for about eight minutes, until their skins are enticingly translucent.
After the dumplings cool down, it’s feasting time. Students and professor briefly admire each other’s crimping signatures before digging in. One of them gasps: “Oh my god, they’re so juicy!”
“Here’s a fun fact: Every single person’s dumpling-prints are distinct,” Professor Miranda Brown says, her hands working golden dough. “The marks left by pinching the edge of the dumpling into place—they’re like handwriting.” Some people can look at a plate of handmade dumplings and know, by the imprints left on the dough, exactly how many people folded them.
As she speaks, there are five people folding dumplings: three students, an alum, and Brown, the Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker Collegiate Professor of Chinese Studies, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and director of LSA’s Honors Program. Brown is standing in a kitchen near campus, rolling out tiny wheat circles that will be shaped into plump bundles of lamb seasoned with cumin, and explaining why she’s using that particular meat in the recipe today.
“About 100 years ago,” Brown says, spooning lamb into the circle of dough in her palm, “Chinese people ate more lamb than pork, but then various ethnic policies standardized lamb and beef diets for Muslim Chinese, and pork for Han Chinese. And a lot of Han Chinese people in the north now don’t even realize that their ancestors 100 years ago were big lamb eaters.”
There’s more to say on the provenance of this batch of dumplings’ ingredients, and many stories about the variety of dumplings found across regions and centuries—stories she shares in lectures on ocean trade routes, religious conversions, imperialist conquest, cultural meeting points, and nomadic civilizations—but now it’s time to place the dumplings she and her students have assembled in a bamboo steamer and cook them for about eight minutes, until their skins are enticingly translucent.
After the dumplings cool down, it’s feasting time. Students and professor briefly admire each other’s crimping signatures before digging in. One of them gasps: “Oh my god, they’re so juicy!”
Brown’s wildly popular “Asian Foodways” course examines the past and present of Asian food and drink and regularly boasts over 200 students. During the course Brown leads students in an exploration of the histories, roots, and controversies surrounding popular Asian foods like dumplings, kimbap, boba, and pad thai, and offers a series of hands-on “food labs” in which students learn how to make these dishes.
Brown finds that when we look closely at the historic foodways that brought us popular dishes, we are “forced to consider that cuisines and cultures can’t be reduced to a single ethnic group.” Dumplings, for example, can be mapped all over the world, and she believes the first dumplings were likely made in Central Asia, or somewhere along the Silk Road, and not in the Chinese heartland.
“Dumplings are particularly interesting because they are a staple of the northern Chinese diet, but likely originated in Central Asia,” Brown says in her Honors Program office. “Northern China is a borderland, a meeting point of different cultures.”
When Brown teaches the history of dumplings and other foods, she’s also delving into over 2,000 years of trade and commerce, religious conversion and conflict, disease, migration, agricultural practices, cultural adaptations, and the development of national identities. The foods from this region are a nexus for approaching these complex connections.
Brown’s wildly popular “Asian Foodways” course examines the past and present of Asian food and drink and regularly boasts over 200 students. During the course Brown leads students in an exploration of the histories, roots, and controversies surrounding popular Asian foods like dumplings, kimbap, boba, and pad thai, and offers a series of hands-on “food labs” in which students learn how to make these dishes.
“Northern nomadic cultures were interested in wheat,” she says, “and the Chinese heartland has always had a strong steaming and boiling culture. That interaction, at this artery of multiple civilizations, is what probably gave birth to the dumpling.
“And now we see dumpling-like foods in Japan with gyoza, in Korea with mandu, and other varieties all over the Central Asian world, in Eastern Europe, in Italy. But the earliest word for steamed dumplings—‘mantou’—comes from a Central Asian, or Turkic, language.”
Brown mentions a tell from an ancient Chinese poem called “The Ode to Bing.” In 300 AD, the poet Shu spilled the tea on dumpling origin with the word “mantou” and a description of “methods for making wheat products [that] come from alien lands.”
“Mantou” is what linguists call a “loan word,” which, Brown explains, is a word borrowed from one language into another that signals the introduction of a new product, food, or concept to a culture. “Sushi” is an example of a food-related loan word in English.
Brown, who is Chinese American, says she initially had a personal attachment to dumplings being a Chinese invention. But the field of food studies, which draws on disciplines as diverse as linguistics, history, medicine, and environmental studies, reveals a richness of cultural exchange behind many of the foods that are dear to her.
“As an aside: Southern Chinese people, like my mother, don’t really know how to make dumplings,” Brown says. “I had rice for almost every single meal as a kid. The Cantonese are rice people.”
In her class, Brown introduces concepts like loan words, “cultural matrix” (the social contexts of eating, religious norms, utensil usage, etc.), and “local adaptations” (an example Brown gives is how American Chinese restaurants devised the much-maligned crab rangoon from the pork wonton) instead of focusing on “authenticity.” Authenticity is a word that comes up a lot in discussions of food and culture. But Brown says it’s fairly empty as a concept.
“This is a word with no real definition. We hear it everywhere—it’s used to certify culinary excellence—but its meaning is largely ambiguous.”
Brown is more interested in digging into the stories behind what’s on our plates and the journeys our cuisines have taken. Many popular Asian foods have traveled far and wide. Take spring rolls, for example. The hot, delightful appetizers defined by a delicate skin that “shatters in your mouth,” Brown says, are a perfect example of a food that has traveled. They’re versatile, traceable, and tell a story of migration and cultural exchange.
Spring rolls first appeared between the 11th and the 14th centuries during the Mongol era, as “a cigar börek, or Muslim roll” in coastal China’s large Muslim community. Back then they were made with a sticky dough and cooked on a hot iron that now only survives in North African food. In the 1600s, with Muslim migration, these rolls rolled from coastal China, and from there, ethnic Chinese people brought them to regions now called Taiwan, India, and the Philippines. “In the Philippines, you see these as lumpia,” Brown says. Tracing Cantonese migration in the 18th and 19th centuries, she describes the adapted rolls of Vietnam, Senegal, the Netherlands, and even a 19th century Mexican version with chiles.
In a lecture on boba, the ubiquitous milky tea with bouncy tapioca pearls, Brown takes her students on a journey from the tea-eating Palung community near the Burmese border in 800 BC to a recent episode of Dragons’ Den, the Canadian equivalent of Shark Tank, in which celebrity judge Simu Liu inflamed the internet masses by rejecting a canned boba startup because the founders did not give proper credit to the Taiwanese influence of the drink.
In her class, Brown introduces concepts like loan words, “cultural matrix” (the social contexts of eating, religious norms, utensil usage, etc.), and “local adaptations” (an example Brown gives is how American Chinese restaurants devised the much-maligned crab rangoon from the pork wonton) instead of focusing on “authenticity.” Authenticity is a word that comes up a lot in discussions of food and culture. But Brown says it’s fairly empty as a concept.
“This is a word with no real definition. We hear it everywhere—it’s used to certify culinary excellence—but its meaning is largely ambiguous.”
Brown is more interested in digging into the stories behind what’s on our plates and the journeys our cuisines have taken. Many popular Asian foods have traveled far and wide. Take spring rolls, for example. The hot, delightful appetizers defined by a delicate skin that “shatters in your mouth,” Brown says, are a perfect example of a food that has traveled. They’re versatile, traceable, and tell a story of migration and cultural exchange.
Spring rolls first appeared between the 11th and the 14th centuries during the Mongol era, as “a cigar börek, or Muslim roll” in coastal China’s large Muslim community. Back then they were made with a sticky dough and cooked on a hot iron that now only survives in North African food. In the 1600s, with Muslim migration, these rolls rolled from coastal China, and from there, ethnic Chinese people brought them to regions now called Taiwan, India, and the Philippines. “In the Philippines, you see these as lumpia,” Brown says. Tracing Cantonese migration in the 18th and 19th centuries, she describes the adapted rolls of Vietnam, Senegal, the Netherlands, and even a 19th century Mexican version with chiles.
In a lecture on boba, the ubiquitous milky tea with bouncy tapioca pearls, Brown takes her students on a journey from the tea-eating Palung community near the Burmese border in 800 BC to a recent episode of Dragons’ Den, the Canadian equivalent of Shark Tank, in which celebrity judge Simu Liu inflamed the internet masses by rejecting a canned boba startup because the founders did not give proper credit to the Taiwanese influence of the drink.
“It’s not a coincidence that boba as we know it today really happened in Taiwan,” Brown says, “but boba is part of a much longer tea-eating tradition, one that spans the Himalayas and goes right into Orange County, California, in the 1980s.”
Brown explains how tea leaves evolved from a food to a drink. It’s a labyrinthine tale that can’t be adequately summarized on a can’s label.
She invokes “the god of tea,” a historical character named Lu Yu, who was abandoned beside a lake swimming with ducks as a baby and taken in by monks. After running off to become a professional clown, he rode the wave of a sobriety movement, transforming into “an eighth century influencer,” and brought the drinking of tea to Buddhist monasteries.
But that’s not all. Milk tea (or butter tea, often made with ghee) exploded in popularity in 800s China, during the Song and Tang dynasties. Clotted cream in tea came into vogue in the 16th century. When the Dutch came to Canton in 1655 they took their milk tea with salt, and brought this version back to Europe. And in the 19th century, when the British colonized Hong Kong, milk tea returned, this time with condensed milk.
As for how tapioca pearls were introduced to milk tea, well, that’s another long story, which might be explained by the 17th century migration of Hakka Chinese settlers across the Straits to Taiwan, who brought with them the tapioca they had cultivated in the hills of their origins, where the soil is too thin to grow rice.
Brown serves a question back to the lecture hall: “Who owns boba?” Most of her students aren’t sure, so she invites them to consider a larger question: “In a world of layered influence, movement, mixing, and culinary fusion, does it even make sense to think of a particular culture owning a food item?”
Brown explains how tea leaves evolved from a food to a drink. It’s a labyrinthine tale that can’t be adequately summarized on a can’s label.
She invokes “the god of tea,” a historical character named Lu Yu, who was abandoned beside a lake swimming with ducks as a baby and taken in by monks. After running off to become a professional clown, he rode the wave of a sobriety movement, transforming into “an eighth century influencer,” and brought the drinking of tea to Buddhist monasteries.
But that’s not all. Milk tea (or butter tea, often made with ghee) exploded in popularity in 800s China, during the Song and Tang dynasties. Clotted cream in tea came into vogue in the 16th century. When the Dutch came to Canton in 1655 they took their milk tea with salt, and brought this version back to Europe. And in the 19th century, when the British colonized Hong Kong, milk tea returned, this time with condensed milk.
As for how tapioca pearls were introduced to milk tea, well, that’s another long story, which might be explained by the 17th century migration of Hakka Chinese settlers across the Straits to Taiwan, who brought with them the tapioca they had cultivated in the hills of their origins, where the soil is too thin to grow rice.
Brown serves a question back to the lecture hall: “Who owns boba?” Most of her students aren’t sure, so she invites them to consider a larger question: “In a world of layered influence, movement, mixing, and culinary fusion, does it even make sense to think of a particular culture owning a food item?”
Brown says that her personal memories are an entry point for thinking about questions on the topic of food.
“Growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, I lived in a food-obsessed culture. So many families in Chinatown got their start in the food industry, so the stakes of this work for me are deeply personal.”
Brown remembers a childhood of moo shu pork, scallion pancakes, sweet hoisin sauce, dim sum at the legendary Yank Sing restaurant, and banquet halls on Clement Street, as well as the Cantonese food served at home by her mother. Now, Brown enjoys cooking at home for her own daughter, who she says is a demanding consumer. She craves pan-fried buns, lamb, xiao long bao soup dumplings, tofu, anything with red bean, and steamed fish. She has that “mild southern Chinese palate,” she says.
Brown says that her personal memories are an entry point for thinking about questions on the topic of food.
“Growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, I lived in a food-obsessed culture. So many families in Chinatown got their start in the food industry, so the stakes of this work for me are deeply personal.”
Brown remembers a childhood of moo shu pork, scallion pancakes, sweet hoisin sauce, dim sum at the legendary Yank Sing restaurant, and banquet halls on Clement Street, as well as the Cantonese food served at home by her mother. Now, Brown enjoys cooking at home for her own daughter, who she says is a demanding consumer. She craves pan-fried buns, lamb, xiao long bao soup dumplings, tofu, anything with red bean, and steamed fish. She has that “mild southern Chinese palate,” she says.
Brown is currently writing a book of essays called Dumpling Therapy for St. Martin’s Press. The book will retell the story of Chinese food in America for a general audience, and Brown will pair her research with memoir pieces that draw on her own family stories.
“I come from a mixed-race Chinese American family, and early on, I think I glommed onto food authenticity as a way of defining myself. As a mixed race person, sometimes I felt that my claim to that culture was tenuous,” Brown says.
But her understanding of authenticity, and of herself in relation to this work, has evolved. “Doing this research helps me work through identity and heritage. And it helps me become less concerned with authenticity. I think of heritage as a living thing rather than as an heirloom. There have been mixed race families since the beginning of time, and historical research has allowed me to better contextualize myself, and honor my heritage. You know, do we do things the same way it was done in the past, or do we do things differently?”
Editor’s Note: With colleagues in the Departments of Asian Languages and Cultures, American Culture, and Afroamerican and African Studies, Brown is part of an emerging interdisciplinary effort to bring food studies to more students. A dedicated food studies kitchen will be ready to meet student appetites in fall 2025.
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| Release Date: | 05/09/2025 |
|---|---|
| Category: | Faculty; Students |
| Tags: | LSA; LSA Magazine; Humanities; Asian Languages and Cultures; Gina Balibrera |
