Dumpling Day Date in the current year: September 26, 2024

Dumpling is an umbrella term for dishes that consist of a piece of dough wrapped around a filling. They can be made with different kinds of dough and a huge variety of fillings, ranging from meat to fruits, and cooked in different ways: baked, boiled, fried, simmered or steamed.

There is a common misconception that dumplings originated in China, but in fact they developed independently in many cuisines around the globe. Moreover, the Chinese language does not have a unifying word for different kinds of dumplings. What Westerners call Chinese dumplings are several distinct dishes: jaozi (fried jaozi are sometimes called potstickers in North America), wonton, zongzi, tangyuan, and many others.

Other East Asian cuisines have their own variants of dumplings, for example, Japanese dango, gyoza and nikuman, Korean mandu, and Mongolian buuz, khuushuur, and bansh. A type of dumpling popular in Central Asia, South Caucasus, Afghanistan and Bosnia is called manti.

Dumplings are also found in many European cuisines. They are especially popular in Central and Eastern Europe (Austria, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine). Central and East European dumplings can be sweet and savory; some are made with wheat flour and some are made from potatoes; some are added to soup and some are served as a main dish or a dessert.

Some types of Italian pasta – ravioli, tortellini and gnocchi – fit the basic definition of dumplings. Outside Italy, ravioli can be found in French (raviole du Dauphiné), Cypriot, and Maltese cuisines. Other European cuisines that have dumplings include Norwegian, Swedish, British, and Irish. Finally, dishes that can be classified as dumplings exist in a variety of African, Caribbean, Latin American, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Southeast Asian cuisines.

National Dumpling Day was created by TMI Food Group, a NY-based manufacturer of Chinese dumplings, dumpling wrappers and noodles under the brand Twin Marquis. The inaugural celebration took place on September 26, 2015. Since then, the Australian food press has picked up on the holiday and began calling it International Dumpling Day or World Dumpling Day.

There are a lot of ways to celebrate Dumpling Day. You can go out to your favorite restaurant that serves dumplings, be it jiaozi, gyoza, pierogi or ravioli; eat different kinds of dumplings for breakfast, lunch and dinner; experiment with various dumpling recipes at home and share your favorite recipes with others; have some friends over for a dumpling cook-off; make a big batch of dumplings and freeze them so that you can have dumplings whenever you feel like it.

And don’t forget to snap a photo of your dumplings and share it on social media to spread the word about the holiday. If you’re not sure which hashtag to use – #DumplingDay, #NationalDumplingDay, #InternationalDumplingDay or #WorldDumplingDay – use all of them to make sure your post doesn’t go unnoticed.