Brian Slattery Photo
May Kho and Ivy Chen check pupils’ progress in making tang yuan.
May Kho, a teaching fellow visiting the Yale-China Association, held a glass bowl in one hand while she gently kneaded the ball of dough inside with the other.
“The dough will be just like clay,” she said. “In the very beginning it will look like a mess, but then it will look like this.” She held up a ball of white dough, nearing something like perfection.
Kho’s observation came as some relief to my family. Their mixtures of rice flour and hot and cold water was very much still in the messy stage.
Steph and Leo Slattery.
“I think I need more water,” said Leo (my son). “I have a tablespoon of stuff on my hands.”
My family and I were taking a workshop on making tang yuan, glutinous rice flour balls stuffed, in this case, with red bean paste. The workshop was one of many activities, free and open to the public, that the Yale-China Association organized for its yearly Lunarfest, a celebration of the Lunar New Year.
The celebration began with a lion parade up Church Street in the morning and sprawled throughout the afternoon. The New Haven Museum on Whitney Avenue hosted calligraphy and dance demonstrations, as well as introductory classes in Mandarin. Henry R. Luce Hall, just around the block on Hillhouse Avenue, hosted several music events, a clothing exhibit — and a couple cooking classes.
And we were hungry.
So we were in a room in Luce Hall with about 30 other people, rolling sticky mixtures of rice flour and water around on paper plates in the hopes of making tang yuan.
“We find it best to add a little hot water and a little cold water,” Kho said. “The key is not to add all the water at once.” She continued to roll her dough ball around in her bowl. “You have to feel it,” she added. “It’s not magic, so it takes some time.” She found her own dough to still be a little too sticky and added more flour.
“You see I kept rolling,” she said, “and now I have a clean bowl.”
She wasn’t lying. Her bowl was nearly spotless. The ball inside looked almost like a marble.
Success.
The rest of us neophytes were still rolling. It didn’t look good. Then, even though Kho had said it wasn’t magic, it seemed to be. On the plate in front of Steph (my wife), a sticky mass became a round ball of pliable dough. “All of a sudden the texture is gorgeous now,” she said.
Kho.
Kho moved on to the next step. “Pinch a little bit of the dough,” she said. “Penny size. If you want to add fillings, you need a little bit more.”
In her hands, she flattened out the little ball she’d pinched off, made it into a little bowl, then put in just enough red bean paste to fill the indentation. She then folded the dough bowl in on itself and rolled it a few more times to seal the paste inside. This while telling us that all kinds of fillings would be acceptable, from peanut butter to chocolate to green tea jelly.
Leo looked down at his own efforts. “None of mine turned out to be balls,” he said.
Ivy Chen, another visiting teaching fellow, was passing by with plates of red bean paste.
“Oh, are you making ravioli?” she teased goodnaturedly.
Steph’s tang yuan turned out a little better, though some were smeared with red bean paste on the outside. Within an hour, we would be taking them home to boil them in water with dissolved palm sugar and ginger in it, as Kho instructed, and eating them as a late afternoon snack. They tasted good. Not bad for a first effort, and certainly promising enough to try again.
At the end of our table, an older woman with a small child rolled ball after ball in her agile palms, with the sure rhythm of someone who’d made many tang yuan before, and would make many more still before the holiday was out. As Kho explained, the name tang yuan was nearly homonymous with the phrase tuan yuen, meaning reunion. These rice flour treats were a staple of the Lunar New Year, as families gathered together to make and eat them, in celebration and anticipation of the year to come.
