Happy Dumpling Festival

The Dumpling Festival (or Duan Wu Jie) is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month (May 28 this year), honours scholar-poet Qu Yuan who took his life by jumping into a river. He did so because he was greatly saddened when the King refused to take his advice, leading to a war. Fearing that fish would eat Qu’s body, his friends and supporters made dumplings and threw them into the river so that the fish would eat them instead of the body.

There are so many types of dumplings available for sale in the market now and you can even buy the dumplings at any time of the year, but for me, eating the dumpling on the day of the Festival has a lot of significance. When we were young, my mom would make the dumplings a few days before the festival and for the next few days, we would be eating the dumplings for breakfast and supper. Nowadays, we would just buy the dumplings from the market and eat them on the day of the festival.

Talking about the different types of dumplings, my favourite is still the ba chang (with pork) but I prefer the green bean filling to the white bean filling as I find them more fragrant. It is quite difficult to find them as those dumplings available for sale in the market are normally with the white bean filling. There is also the Baba-Nyonya dumpling and the gan-suei (non-meat glutinous rice) dumpling (plain or with red bean filling). The normal price of the dumplings can be between RM2.60 to RM3.20 depending on the type and size but since the price of the ingredients and bamboo leaves had gone up, it might be more expensive . Anyone know where I can get nice and reasonably priced dumplings in PJ?

Happy Dumpling Festival!



You can check out the recipes for the different types of dumplings here.