They could have called them pelmeni chinois or maultaschen chinois except it turns out there's an actual regional and very old French dish called Ravioles du Dauphiné.
They're stuffed with Comté cheese, fromage blanc, eggs and parsley.
So, ravioles chinoise - with the -es spelling, anyway - isn't a deliberate avoidance of English (well, not just that) but might, just might, have been adapted from a legitimate though rare French term.
Because compared to the rest of the world, French cookery is quite remarkable in its dumplinglessness. (That's a word now...)
It has quenelles, the best-known of which are traditionally made from fish (pike) but also from cheese...
.... and are like German liver dumplings (Leberknödel) to the extent that "Knödel" may even be the origin of "quenelle".
This name-change is rather like the way the French word for insubstantial nibbles or "little somethings" - quelquechoses - became "kickshaws" in English, as seen here in Shakespeare's "Henry IV Part II":
"Some pigeons, Davy, a couple of short-legged hens, a joint of mutton, and any pretty little tiny kickshaws, tell William cook."
The only other thing I could find being called a "dumpling" is the "farz" part of kig ha farz, an even more regional Breton treatment using an egg-butter-milk-buckwheat batter tied in a bag then cooked in the same pot as - and served with - pot-au-feu.
It may look like a dumpling when bagged, but when plated it looks like haggis. That crumbly texture means it's sometimes called couscous breton, and it's dressed with a buttery, oniony, sometimes bacony sauce called lipig (which, inevitably, I keep misreading as Lipwig...)
However farz is also made with white flour, and that version isn't crumbled but sliced like so...
...and sometimes fried, like King Arthur's bag-pudding.
Pudding, BTW, is another language-swap, originally from French "boudin", meaning a sausage - Irish / UK black and white pudding and French boudin noir and boudin blanc are definitely related.
The word then broadened meaning into something cooked inside a casing (a haggis is the "great chieftain o' the pudding race") or a bag / cloth, where the old method of cooking Christmas pudding isn't too far from what's done with kig ha farz.
When Good King Arthur Ruled This Land
A Nursery Rhyme
When good King Arthur ruled this land,
He was a goodly king;
He stole three pecks of barley-meal
To make a bag-pudding.
A bag-pudding the king did make,
And stuffed it well with plums;
And in it put great lumps of fat,
As big as my two thumbs.
The king and queen did eat thereof,
And noblemen beside;
And what they could not eat that night,
The queen next morning fried.
As far as I could find out before deciding it was the "looking for a black cat in a darkened coal-cellar and BTW the cat isn't there" thing - ravioles, quenelles and possibly farz are the only French examples of what this Wikipedia link lists as a "dumpling".
If there IS some obscure or forgotten French regional dish which would qualify as le domplén Normande, la boulette de pâte or whatever, I'd love to know.
dailybridgerton
titsay
blakekathryn
kaledo-art
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