I've been thinking a bit about those questions I asked about mantı yesterday - who on earth thought of making such tiny complicated things and why, is I suppose the basic question. Personally think the answer lies somewhere along that line of figures above, but let me digress a little first.
Since mantı are a form of dumpling - a thing that exists in an absolute multitude of forms around the world, I decided to see if I could come up with a definitive answer on the net. And what I found was this:
"Most experts believe that dumplings were invented by Zhang Zhongjing, a Chinese medicine practitioner who lived in the Eastern Han Dynasty, the second imperial dynasty of China that lasted from 206 BC to 220 AD.
As legend tells it, it was a difficult winter and many were experiencing ill effects from the cold. To help people warm up, Zhongjing took mutton, herbs, and chilis and wrapped them in dough, then steamed them to bind everything together and keep them warm. These steaming, pillow-like treats helped people overcome the cold weather, while the herbs that Zhongjing put inside worked to improve blood circulation and prevent frostbite." Chef One
He shaped them like ears apparently, I read elsewhere because:
"eating food that looks like the body part you want to heal will then heal that body part. Obviously." Asian Inspirations
It's a nice story and even the quote describes it as legend, and it may well have happened or something similar, but can we really put down the invention of a dumpling - for lack of a better word - i.e. wrapping something in some kind of dough and then cooking it - to just one moment on one spot on the globe? Even darkest Africa has some I believe. There is also evidence of a recipe in the Roman Apicius' cookbook. And South and Central Americans have been wrapping things in dough since - well when?
Mind you, dumplings are obviously a relatively late development in the field of cooking. Archaeologists seem to think that the first way of cooking, as I have said before, was to cook meat over a fire. First you have to learn how to make a fire and initially this would just be for frightening away the animals and keeping yourself warm. They now think that somebody might have found some animal burnt in a bushfire, which tasted better than raw meat. Over time - millenia, even millions of years - they worked out better ways of doing this with primitive spits. Other things were heated in water shells, skulls, and other such receptacles, or wrapped in leaves, and heated on rocks .... And maybe around this time they started grinding seeds, mixing them with water to make a paste - or dough - which was then cooked on the rocks. Primitive bread.
All of that took a very, very, long time, and would surely have been happening in many different places. The invention of bread can surely not be ascribed to one person. So why do we ascribe the invention of dumplings to just one man?
The next big leap forward was when ceramics were invented and things could be cooked in pots. By now there was division of labour as well and division of society - those with the power - and the servants to do things for them, and those who had to do everything themselves. Specialist cooks to the powerful, probably had the incentive to be inventive to gain prestige from their masters.
Bread evolved into pastry I guess, and then people started wrapping things in pastry or putting stuff on top.
I suspect there were two different reasons for the invention of dumplings. For the rich - it was, as I said, to impress, and you can indeed see that the tinier and prettier the dumpling the more impressive it was. Although tiny is not a path that the Chinese have taken in dumpling evolution. Some are small, but not tiny.
The second is the necessity option:
"Just like bread, dumplings probably arose independently across several different cultures and continents as a way to stretch a small amount of food further. Mix some pork or beef with cabbage and wrap it in dough and it’s a pretty filling meal." Asian Inspirations
In fact you can just wrap the meat in the cabbage. As many cultures do. And maybe the making things go further option explains my other question about why the time and money poor of the world would spend a lot of time making something so complicated. I guess people like this tend to live in communities and of course, many hands make light work. And it's an activity that simultaneously provides tasty food from virtually nothing, and gives the opportunity for social interaction. Especially for women, whose lives in such communities are often circumscribed.
I still don't really get the 'why so tiny?' question though. I mean you could make bigger ones. But maybe bigger ones would require more meat. The dough is the very cheap part of the process. The meat is not. Bigger ones would not take so long either. Maybe the real reason for tiny is the socail reason. One person can make big dumplings, but tiny ones need lots of people.
I also wonder who dreamt up the fact that these particular dumplings are cooked twice - boiled, then baked, and then drowned in three different sauces. Was this one person's invention, that just spread far and wide, or did lots of people in different places try the same things?
And going back to those ancient peoples - the ones post prehistoric times - I really cannot believe that it was just one person who thought of wrapping meat in pastry and then cooking it. And the same applies to just about every human invention really. Obviously as time goes on we learn from what exists and look to improve it. We build on what has gone before and then we spread the idea around. Faster and faster as time goes on.
Our brains were just as big back then. They just didn't contain all the knowledge that they do today and so progress was more gradual. Mind you in some ways, especially today, we have gone back to the beginning - as the opening picture shows. Barbecues are big - we just have better ways of controlling the fire, and better ways of preparing the meat. Better meat.
The human brain is a wonderful thing, which is why the world has such a rich and varied way of making the same thing. Meat wrapped in pastry.
BACK JUST A LITTLE WAY IN TIME
December 14
2023 - Orts - a bits and pieces post on drinks and pasta water candles
2022 - Nothing
2020 - The Christmas ham takeover
2017 - Nothing
We are what we eat! 🤣