Lamb Shaomai Dumplings 羊肉烧卖

Ingredients

Chinese Wikipedia places the origin of shaomai in northern China, where the filling is mainly meat; glutinous rice only became the main ingredient after the dumpling travelled south. The version from beyond the Great Wall (塞北) takes mutton or another meat as its main filling and adds no glutinous rice, and its classic filling is mutton with the white part of the spring onion.

How it is made

The oldest known record comes from the Goryeo Korean book Piao Tongshi (朴通事), written in the Yuan dynasty about life in the capital Dadu (大都). An annotated edition explains the dish: wheat dough is rolled into thin sheets, wrapped around chopped meat and steamed, then eaten with soup. The wrapper is gathered and pinched fine at the top, as if tied with thread.

Where it comes from

Hohhot (呼和浩特), known in the past as Guihua (归化), was a trading hub from the Qing dynasty into the 1930s, home to merchants from Shanxi and Hui traders, and the name shaomai (稍麦) is said to have spread from there. Shaomai houses near Qianmen (前门) in old Beijing hung signs reading "Guihua City shaomai" (归化城稍美) to show where their dumplings came from.

The Suiyuan Gazetteer draft (绥远通志稿), completed in 1937, singles out the shaomai sold in Guihua as a speciality. Teahouses sold it on the side, and because the local word for "on the side" was shao (捎), the dumpling was called shaomai (捎卖). The gazetteer adds that Guihua shaomai had long been famous, and that copies made in other counties and towns tasted a little worse. Chinese Wikipedia names Maixiangcun (麦香村) in Hohhot among the well-known makers.