Rie McClenny grew up in southwest Japan with family members who not only loved to cook but, as the owners of a tea room and cafe in their small seaside city, were pretty good at it. The simple, home-cooked meals her mother, Yoko, and maternal grandmother, Kiyoko, prepared for their rural customers using seasonal local ingredients and traditional recipes were far from fancy. The women were particularly good at making one beloved Japanese comfort food: the pan-fried dumplings filled with minced pork and cabbage known as yaki-gyoza.
As McClenny recalls in her first cookbook they were absolute whizzes at folding dough wrappers around the savoury filling to create dumplings that were juicy and tender on the inside and, when fried, crispy golden-brown on the outside. So good, in fact, that she never felt the urge to learn to make them herself. “I enjoyed baking, and also enjoyed reading recipes in cookbooks and magazines,” she says from her home in the US city of Los Angeles, “but my mum was such a great cook I didn’t feel I needed to do it.
” While her mum imparted a few basics before she left home to go to university in Osaka, it was not until McClenny landed in a rural town in the US state of West Virginia during a year abroad that she realised reading about cooking is a sad substitute for actually doing it. “There was only one Asian market, so I used what was available,” she says. She found herself compromising once again with ingredients in her chase to conjure th.
