Mommy, Where Do Dumplings Come from？

I feel certain that in one of my mom's past lives she was Chinese and had her own restaurant. You could not tell this by looking at her of course, but her passion for cooking is proof enough for me. This is further endorsed by the magnitude of dumplings in our house. Whenever I come home the refrigerator is loaded with mom's homemade dumplings or their Slavonic cousins, known as vareniks. When I visited Beijing for the first time in October 1999 I