Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

One of the traditional Spring Festival activities for Chinese is making dumplings. Few would quibble with having to eat dumplings, but in fact, making dumplings is also a wonderfully enjoyable way of passing the time with friends and family members.

Tasks are divvied up, and then the hours just fly by with kneading, chopping or folding on the one hand, and an endless stream of gossip on the other.

This year was my first Spring Festival in the UK, but along with a group of Chinese friends, we decided to continue the annual ritual of dumpling making. We were expecting almost 50 friends from different parts of the world to join us for our dumpling dinner party, so our work was cut out for us. 

Our workflow, starting from scratch, went something like this. We finely diced the vegetables, pork, beef and other ingredients. We mixed water and flour to make the dough. We cut up the dough, and rolled it out. Then we put in the filling, and wrapped them up into dumplings. All in all, it took us around four hours. 

One might wonder why we went to all that effort instead of just buying pre-made frozen dumplings from the supermarket. But truthfully, I couldn't imagine a more enjoyable afternoon than the one we had making dumplings. My job was to cut the ginger and garlic into very small pieces. Half would be used in the dumpling filling, and half would be used for the sauce that people could dip their dumplings into if they so wished.

I demonstrated to some of our non-Chinese friends how to use a Chinese cleaver. As the sound of chopping filled the room, it occurred to me that we were not unlike a miniature marching band.

Some of my friends joked that I should take a picture of myself chopping ginger and put it on my resume. Of course, a mechanical mincing machine could have done the same job in a fraction of the time. But where would the fun be in that?

Before that afternoon, it had also never occurred to me that there are so many ways of wrapping dumplings. As China is so vast a country, each region has its own variations as to how to fold the dumpling, the shape of the dumpling, and the way the wrapper is creased. 

I remember once watching a Chinese cooking show, where a famous chef said that every time he cooked a dish, it was a little different. It's a mixture of atmosphere, the quality of the raw ingredients, and his emotional state at the time that he is cooking. I couldn't agree more.

These days, we are inundated with processed foods and fast foods to cater to the rapid rhythms of modern life. The effort and expertise that goes into making a meal from scratch is less and less appreciated. The act of preparing food has moved primarily from the domestic to the industrial sphere, and slowly but surely, traditional and social rituals of making food together are disappearing. We have convenience at the expense of the joy that comes with actually making something ourselves, with and for the ones we love.

This, as much as any other reason, is why I am happy each year to make dumplings for Spring Festival.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.