Dumplings and sausages

I spent a good fifteen minutes reading about dumplings on Wikipedia the other day. I guess the things one can do with food are limited, but that knowledge never stops me from finding it remarkable that there are so many dishes that seem to have evolved in parallel within different cuisines, as it were. For example, noodles and pasta have similarities, there's calzone and the Cornish pasty, and of course there are dumplings and wontons from China to Eastern European pierogi/vareniki to Italian tortellini. I suppose the dumpling/pasty thing is simply a neat way of serving lots of different fillings, but it's still interesting. My husband is half Ukrainian, so imagine our delight when we discovered that whilst I can make jiaozi filled with pork and vegetables, he makes vareniki filled with cheese and potato, both of which are cased in a flour and water dough and shaped like stuffed half-moons. Of course I prefer mine, though - I mean, what's the deal with the Ukrainian stodge pie? To be fair, vareniki can have other fillings, but this is the recipe that has been passed down to him.

Then there are variations on salami. The Chinese have one called lap cheong or lap cheung (yeah, no, my surname doesn't mean 'sausage' - that would be too funny. Sorry, different word) that (I think) literally translates as 'wax sausage'. It is often eaten steamed, sliced and doused in soy sauce, which balances its inherent sweetness and fattiness. Oh lord, I could do with some now! But it's so bad for you... There are certain foodstuffs that take you to a particular experience in your life - this sausage reminds me of the first meal we would have at home in England having arrived back that day from Hong Kong. Because the quality of imported products such as these in England isn't as great as in its native land, my parents would smuggle (well, I don't know how legal it was) things like dried oysters, dried sausage, preserved duck and salted fish back in these enormous blue-striped canvas sacks back from HK any time we went there. My god, did we exceed our baggage limit! It was embarrassing - and I guess it must have been allowed because the pungent reek emanating from our luggage would surely give its contents away. Anyway, after we had got home from the airport and had a rest, when it came to food there was nothing in the house, so what better to do than crack open the preserved goodies and re-live the HK experience? You'd think that after weeks of being away from home we would want something not Chinese, but this stuff is something else entirely. You might hate it if you didn't grow up eating it - it's kinda weird, but I still like it now.