Usually at this time of year during the week before Christmas I’m busy making sausage rolls.  Delia Smith’s ones.  The best ones there are.  A slab of flaky or puff pastry is rolled out into a rectangle about 12″ by 9″ or 30cm by 22cm and cut into three equal strips.

Delia Smith’s Sausage Rolls

Along each of these strips I add a long sausage of pork sausage filling, roll the pastry around the meat mixture, seal the two ends with brushed beaten egg, cut the long sausage into inch long lengths (2-3 cm), snip the tops with a pair of scissors three or so times to make an arrow pattern along the top, glaze the top with beaten egg and then pop them in the oven until they are nicely browned.  The pork filling is made from 1lb  (0.5 kg) of sausage meat – (ground pork), mixed with a finely chopped onion and five or so fresh sage leaves plucked from the herb garden outside my kitchen door and chopped small.  They are delicious, more-ish and never last long in our household.  We eat them whenever we can find an excuse, but most especially when we are opening presents on Christmas morning alongside a glass of homemade sloe gin or cherry brandy. They are Christmas between your fingertips.  The ultimate comfort food and I have none of them here.  I could make them, but I haven’t.  I could get hold of the minced pork and the brown onion and although the Chinese don’t seem to use it, I have found some in one of the western supermarkets and I could make my own flaky pastry if I looked for a recipe on line. And last week we went out and bought a work-top oven for under 1000 RMB (approx. £100) so now I could actually bake them.  But I’ve not bothered.  Those are for Christmas in the UK and we’ll return to those morsels when once again we live in Blighty. But for now we have Xiao Long Bao, which I think is Shanghai’s answer to the sausage roll.  Literally meaning steamed soup dumpling, they are one of Shanghai’s signature dishes. Made of pork and pastry, hot, delicious with spring onions not brown ones, steamed in a bamboo steamer over a wok, not baked in an oven, with the pork surrounded by a melted pork jelly known as the soup, not dry as in sausage rolls.  The pork and soup sit in a little pastry sack, like an medieval purse, instead of in a cylinder with the sausage meat showing at both ends.  There is no sage in sight, but the oily heady distinctive pungent flavour of sage is not the only herb that goes well with pork and in Shanghai ginger, sesame oil, rice wine, light soy sauce provide the flavouring and the saltiness – the pepper used is white, whereas I would season my rolls with black pepper and sea salt. You can eat Xiao Long Bao in various places all over the city, but today I went back to the Chinese Cooking Workshop, where I first went not long after we arrived in Shanghai, and learned how to make them myself.

Pork & Jelly Mixture With Added Flavourings

We were provided with the pork and cold, white solidified pork jelly already finely chopped to mincing point (which would have been done just with the help of a cleaver) to which we added the seasonings and flavourings and set to one side.  Then we started on the wrappers.  Made from scratch, flour was mixed with water to form a dough which was then kneaded until springy and then rolled out, folded into thirds, turned and rolled out again 5 more times. It was then rolled up and rolled out into a long sausage about 30cms long and cut into 8 equal pieces.  These were shaped into drums and then flattened a little by hand and then a rolling pin was used make half the flattened disks into wonton wrappers.  The rolling pin was rolled to the centre of the disk and out again, the wrapper was turned, the rolling pin went to the centre and back

The Class in Full Flow

Wrappers Trying to Curl at the Edges

again, round and round until a disk about the size of a mug was achieved.  If you were lucky and knew what you were doing, which none of the students did, the pastry was curled up all around the circumference as a result of this process.  After rolling out four disks, we used the

My Xiao Long Bao

remaining four lumps of dough to act as the pork stuffing to practice making the buns.  Essentially the rim of the wrapper is pleated again and again on itself.  And each time a pleat is made the pleated dough is stretched up and the the stuffing is pushed into the resulting cavity until the pleated wanton goes all the way round the pork

stuffing mix. I couldn’t get the hang of it at first, no matter how I tried, but eventually it was established that as a left hander I should be using my left hand to fold the wrapper edge and my right hand to cradle the wrapper and compress the filling into towards the folded sack.  Once I’d reversed everything, I got the hang of it fairly quickly, so we then re-rolled the dough up in swiss roll fashion, wrapped it in cling

Buns in the Bamboo Steamer

film and left to rise for 15 mins or so, we moved onto to use the real pork stuffing. Once made – the instructress described mine as not bad, at least I think that’s what she said in Mandarin – the xiao long boa were placed in a steamer on a grease-proof liner and stacked in a wok to steam for 10 mins.  Served with a mixture of rice vinegar and chilli oil into which they are dipped, they are cradled on a

spoon for you to slurp the soup  out of the hole in the top before eating the rest of the dumpling off the spoon with chopsticks. Not quite Delia’s sausage rolls, but to die for in a similar way.

Whilst the xiao long boa were steaming our attention turned to a sago dessert – coconut sago sweet soup.  I’ve had very little to do with Sago in my life – my mother was traumatised by tapioca during the war and so we never had either starch product when I was growing up.  But not that long ago my daughter introduced me to Taiwanese Bubble Tea which uses tapioca, and sago behaves in a similar way – translucent balls of starch (once hydrated) that are added to a flavouring.  The sago must be prepared separately from the flavouring – pouring

Coconut Sago Sweet Soup

it into boiling water and then simmering it for 10 minutes.  By this time it will have turned partially translucent and so you turn off the heat, cover with a lid and let it stand for another 10 minutes, by which time it will be fully translucent.  Once this point has been reached, the sago balls are gathered up with a strainer (don’t touch them) and transferred to another bowl full of water.  If you don’t do this any dessert you make will have excess starch and be too thick and gloopy (which is probably where my mother’s wartime experience led her). So once rinsed, the sago balls are added to a cup, and some coconut milk and condensed milk is added in a portion of about three to one and the Coconut Sago Sweet Soup is ready to go.

Delia’s Iced Christmas Pud

And funnily enough, I would also have been making a Delia Smith Christmas Ice Cream which also uses coconut milk, instead of the more traditional Christmas Pudding:  two Christmas favourites Chinese-style.