Not Enough Ginger
The last time I folded dumplings with my grandmother, she would not let me near the filling.
“You measure,” she said, “and you get a recipe. I want you to get a memory.”
I was seventeen and thought that was the most frustrating sentence anyone had ever said to me. She pinched salt straight from the open bag, no spoon. She grated ginger until she liked the smell. She tasted the raw pork, which I told her would kill her, and she told me in Cantonese that I worried too much and peeled garlic badly.
We made ninety-one dumplings. I know because I counted, because counting was the only thing I was allowed to control.
She died the next spring. I have her pan, her rolling pin, the small dent in the counter where she always set the cleaver. What I do not have is the ratio. For years I made dumplings that were almost right, which is worse than wrong, because almost means you can taste the person standing just behind you and you cannot turn around.
Last week my niece asked me to teach her. She is nine. She held the spoon like a pen. And I heard myself say, “Do not measure. Taste it. What does it need?”
She stuck a finger in the filling and licked it. “More ginger,” she said.
“Not enough,” I said. “But you knew that.”
She did not write anything down. Neither did I.
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