Mandu (Korean Dumplings)

Mandu came to Korea from China, and both national encyclopedias agree it had arrived by the Goryeo dynasty. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture points to the official history Goryeosa, which records that in the reign of King Chunghye people who slipped into the royal kitchen to steal mandu were punished — proof the food was known at court, though not of which kind it was. In China, the encyclopedia explains, a leavened bun with a filling is mantou or baozi, while a thin wrapper folded around a filling and boiled, fried or steamed is jiaozi.

The second clue is a song. Ssanghwajeom, a Goryeo song that records say was staged before King Chungnyeol in 1279, when the court was under heavy Yuan (Mongol) influence, is set in a shop selling ssanghwa — a sound-borrowed word for mandu — kept by a hoehoe, a Central Asian Muslim. In the folk encyclopedia, food historian Joo Young-ha calls ssanghwa-byeong a kind of mandu that entered the peninsula in the Yuan period and describes it as unfilled; the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture instead describes ssanghwa as leavened dough steamed around a filling. Either way, names shifted over the Joseon period: leavened buns came to be called sanghwa, and the thin-skinned dumpling took the name mandu, which it keeps today.

Wheat was scarce, so Joseon cooks often made wrappers from buckwheat bound with mung bean starch. The 17th-century cookbook Eumsik dimibang gives buckwheat mandu filled with pheasant (or beef) and soft-boiled radish, fish-skin eomandu, and seongnyutang, a soup of dumplings shaped like little pomegranates. The folk encyclopedia notes that mandu soup was a New Year dish in some 17th-century households until Seoul custom settled on rice-cake soup (tteokguk), while Pyeongan and Hwanghae families kept making mandu for Seollal. Because buckwheat and wheat grew best in the north, the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture says, mandu developed most in Pyeongan and Hamgyeong. After 1882, Chinese settlers in Incheon sold jiaozi, baozi and wonton, and Koreans called the boiled kinds mul-mandu. See making mandu, the history of mandu and Korean-Chinese food.

• Protein from several sources: pork, tofu and egg together make a serving a good source of protein; pork also supplies thiamin.
• Vegetables inside: sprouts, kimchi and green onion make up a large share of the filling, adding folate and some fiber.
• Gentle cooking: steamed or boiled mandu need no frying oil; pan-fried versions absorb noticeably more fat.

• Pyeongan and Hwanghae (northern provinces): large dumplings made for Seollal; the writer Heo Gyun (1569–1618) noted that people of Uiju made big mandu as well as the Chinese did.
• Gaeseong pyeonsu (Gaeseong): the city's famous dumpling, sold in Gaeseong and Seoul noodle houses under Japanese rule. A 1929 magazine quoted by the folk encyclopedia lists a filling of beef, pork, chicken, fresh oysters, pine nuts, mushrooms, mung bean sprouts and tofu, with sprouts and tofu kept under a third of the mixture.
• Court and yangban mandu: eomandu, with thin slices of fish as the wrapper, and gyuasang, shaped like a sea cucumber — both made with costly ingredients.
• By filling and cooking: meat (gogi), kimchi, squash or mushroom fillings; simmered in broth as manduguk, steamed as jjin-mandu, or served in chilled broth.
• Mul-mandu: small boiled dumplings of Korea's ethnic Chinese; the folk encyclopedia notes several specialist shops around Seoul's Bukchang-dong before the 1980s.