We cooked a lot in our house, from morning until night, but we never used to make dumplings. They were a treat reserved for family meals out.
That was our Sunday lunchtime outing, instead of church. We would reel off the numbers of the dishes we wanted to order. Har gao, xiu mai, char siu bao… these names punctuated my childhood years.
It wasn’t much later, when I began writing cookery books, that I started badgering my mother to test out all sorts of recipes. Recipes we loved eating but never made ourselves. These are the recipes I wanted to put down in writing as part of our family’s culinary heritage, and which I am sharing with you now.
Fried prawn dumplings
MAKES 24 // PREP TIME 30 MINS // COOK 2 MINS
FILLING
½ onion
50 gm water chestnuts or ½ carrot
300 gm raw prawns, defrosted and shelled
1 egg white
1 tbsp Maizena
1 tsp sugar
1 large tbsp oyster sauce
PASTRY
1 packet of
