My American Grandma’s Wonton Soup

One of my earliest and recurring memories is driving up north to my grandma’s house in Skokie, IL, where she would welcome my parents and me into her beautiful home with a small kitchen and large windows overlooking the backyard. It is there that I would spend many of my days watching TV, chatting, and enjoying my grandma’s cooking. Although she is white, she makes excellent Chinese food, with my favorite being her wonton soup. As the years pass, my grandma’s fingers become more stiff and prone to locking in painful positions, so making wonton soup is truly a labor of love that I cherish. Despite her limitations, my grandma is excellent at folding the wontons. While my mom and I slowly work our way through our stack of dumpling wrappers, my grandma is significantly quicker than us, creating the same amount of wontons as my mom and I combined. It is clear how this process is ingrained into her muscle memory. 

My grandma was born on a farm in a village in East Illinois that now has a population of less than 400 people. During a visit to Chicago, she met and eventually married my grandpa, a Chinese immigrant. Together, they raised three children. My grandpa worked as an anesthesiologist while my grandma was a stay-at-home mother, in charge of all household tasks including, and especially, cooking. You can taste her love and passion for cooking in her rich and flavorful dishes that both came from her village upbringing like chicken noodle, scalloped corn, and spaghetti and meatballs, but also in her Cantonese dishes such as chow mein, chicken and snow pea stir-fry, and of course, wonton soup. My grandma learned some of her Chinese cooking skills from her husband, but he was out of the house most of the day. Therefore, back when they lived in an apartment before the birth of my mother, her Cantonese neighbors helped her understand and prepare more Cantonese dishes. The various Cantonese families who were happy to share their skills and techniques with her is indicative of the role of food as culture for Chinese immigrants, who used cuisine as a source of joy and community. For those same reasons, my Grandma learned to cook Chinese food out of the desire to make her husband happy and to remind him of home, even if he also enjoyed American food.
 

Growing up, I loved her chicken noodle, passed down by her mother, more than anything else, but wonton soup took the spotlight in my heart at around 12 years old. After I officially declared it to my grandma, she remarked that wonton soup is considerably harder to make than chicken noodle. Of course, I believed her, but I grew to understand what she meant when Grandma, my Mom, and I made wontons together. She, like many cooks with seasoned experience, does not use exact measurements, but she tried her best to approximate for the sake of my notes app method of writing down the steps. I have noticed that between the few times I have made wontons with her, the measurements change slightly every time. 

The tedious process includes simmering the broth for two hours, creating and kneading the flavorful filling with the right ratio of pork to shrimp, and painstakingly folding each wonton individually. My grandpa taught her the original recipe, including how to fold the wontons, but my grandma noted that his wontons were not as complex in ingredients and flavor. Over the years, she adjusted the recipe to her tastes, adding some ingredients such as teriyaki sauce. This practice of making small changes is true to many of her Chinese dishes, which perhaps brought them further from “authenticity” while also introducing new flavors that make the dishes uniquely hers. While we look forward to eating the wontons, we also use the time folding as a chance to catch up and chat, both about our current lives and to share stories from before I was born. My family’s history is reflected in the history of Chinese Americans in the United States, with food playing a significant role. 

The wonton, being a dumpling, is a popular creation of many cultures with different specificities. In most countries, you can find some type of dumpling in the form of filling, oftentimes meat with spices and herbs, wrapped in dough and small enough to eat in one bite. In China specifically, dumplings originated in the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 BCE) and were created by a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, Zhang Zhongjing¹. He created them as a remedy when his village contracted frostbite, although there is no proof that dumplings cure frostbite. Chinese jiaozi, along with different iterations in different countries, were unified under the name “dumpling” in the 17th century when it was first used in an English document, the name likely coming from Germany². The base recipe of lamb, black peppers, and therapeutic herbs was elaborated on over time³ until we reached the vast array of dumpling varieties that are available today. They have remained a symbol of success and fortune, both consumed during New Year’s Eve in the North and enjoyed any time of the year otherwise. 

Chinese cuisine and its history, especially in the United States, has not had thorough scholarly attention until recently because there is a lack of historical sources due to its perceived unimportance in American academia and the lack of first-hand accounts from Chinese American restaurateurs⁴. However, Chinese cuisine in the United States has a rich history filled with the marginalization of immigrants, but also their success in the restaurant industry. The first large wave of Asian immigrants was in the mid-19th century in the form of Chinese immigrants with the Gold Rush⁵. The accompanying presence of Chinese food was not due to their desire to spread their cuisine, but because Chinese dishes were deeply important to their community and cultural identity. Chinese ingredients that were not sold in the United States were imported directly from China. Many Chinese communities started with restaurants, their success owed to the fact that the vast majority of Chinese immigrants at the time were men who worked long hours and had little cooking skill. Restaurants served not only as a source of familiar food for little money, but also “a culturally important space to rest and socialize.”⁶ 

This is reminiscent of Ray Oldenburg’s concept of third places, defined as locations that are not the workplace or the home, where people can relax in public.⁷ Although they did not fulfill every characteristic that Oldenburg outlined, they served as a neutral ground⁸ for friends to come and go without a specified host, conversation was one of the main activities⁹, the hours of operation and price per meal were accessible¹⁰ to workers making little money, there were regulars¹¹ who lit up the space and created a friendly atmosphere, it had a low profile¹² that created a home-like environment, and it served as a home away from home¹³ for the tired, often homesick workers. Although my grandpa arrived in the United States much later in the mid-1950s, he was a single man until his 30s. While he had to cook for himself sporadically, he loved to go to restaurants and talk to their owners and patrons, both making small talk and asking about what ingredients were in the dishes. These conversations with the chefs and owners meant that even if he did not have much cooking experience or knew exactly how a dish was made, he could still guide my grandma in teaching her basic food he enjoyed. My mother reminisced about her childhood, saying he requested white rice at least three times a week, which my grandma happily obliged. After starting a family, my grandpa brought his wife and kids to restaurants in Chicago’s Chinatown. He would often chat with restaurant owners and ask for dishes that were not on the menu but were prepared specifically because he knew how to ask for them in Cantonese. 

Chinese restaurants only served Chinese customers up until the 1880s¹⁴ because, leading up to then, Chinese food was considered odorous and unsanitary to white Americans. Coincidentally, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed around the same time, significantly curbing Chinese American populations. When the fear of Chinese food began to subside, Chinatown became a tourist attraction accompanied by Chinese America’s urbanization. Their most popular destinations were restaurants, which is why they were able to expand beyond Chinese-dominated neighborhoods by the early 1900s.¹⁵ The main customers were not privileged middle-class white Americans, who usually went as a sporadic curiosity, but other marginalized Americans such as African Americans and immigrants from Eastern Europe. They formed a reliable client base through their low prices and flavorful dishes. In these Chinese restaurants away from Chinatown, they served less cultural dishes like shark’s fin and bird’s nest, and more dishes like chop suey and egg foo young, which appealed more to non-Chinese taste buds.¹⁶ In the late 1960s, interest in Chinese food, along with Chinese immigration, exploded due to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and Nixon’s highly publicized visit to China in 1972.¹⁷ The new Chinese immigrants provided the necessary labor to fuel restaurant expansion, and they came from many parts of China such as Beijing, Sichuan, and Hunan. This expanded types of Chinese cuisine, which had been overwhelmingly Cantonese. By 1980, Chinese food was the most popular ethnic cuisine and people became more interested in “authentic” Chinese food,¹⁸ demonstrating the continued commodification of Chinese cuisine. Chinese people have found success in the restaurant business, but have also been restrained by expectations of what they should sell and how their business should present.

Although my family occasionally goes out for Chinese food, especially dim sum, much of my exposure to Chinese food has been my grandma’s cooking. Cooking is a vehicle of connection to family and culture,¹⁹ which I have experienced through family celebrations and holidays, almost always centered around Grandma’s cooking. When the uncles, aunts, and cousins fly into Chicago, Grandma cooks a grand feast, and we all recite a Cantonese prayer before eating, passed down from my grandfather by his children. Through this tradition, we feel closer to each other and my grandfather’s culture, even if we are otherwise culturally more American. In a study on the role of cooking in family and cultural connections, Tammie Chen discusses how “participants with a more recent family immigration history feel a stronger connection to culture through cooking while participants who have had more previous family generations living in the United States feel a stronger connection to family through cooking.”²⁰ I found this observation interesting and surprisingly accurate for me; I do feel connected to Chinese culture through food, but I much more relate Chinese cooking to family events and closeness; I rarely eat Chinese food on my own, so it has become strongly tied to memories of family. My grandpa died before I was born, but I feel connected to him through Grandma’s cooking, knowing that he once ate the same food that I am. Chinese food has become a symbol of warmth, connection, and community for me, in great part thanks to my grandma’s decision to continue cooking it.

It is somewhat uncommon for a white woman to have such experience and familial connection to Chinese food and would have been even rarer when my grandparents got married in the 1950s. When someone from one culture becomes immersed in another, there are sometimes claims of cultural appropriation or claiming another culture for one’s own benefit. I firmly believe that my grandma does not fall under that label. She started cooking Chinese food because my grandpa needed to eat rice for his own happiness, and she raised her children multiculturally with a love for both cultures. She adopted and incorporated Chinese culture into her own life out of devotion to her husband and her family has thrived off of that connection. While Chinese cuisine in the US has turned more American over time, my grandma has embraced traditional Chinese cooking out of love for her family.

Wonton Soup Recipe

Chicken Broth:

Ingredients:

• Water
• Salt
• 4 thighs with the leg bone in, skin on chicken
• 2 inch big chunk of peeled ginger
• 1 chicken bouillon cube

Instructions:

• Cover chicken with water, fill big pot to a little more than halfway
• Put chink of ginger and salt into water
• Bring to a rolling boil, then let it simmer
• Simmer on low for 2 hours, and remove the chicken after the first hour
• When it’s cooking, add chicken bouillon cube

Wonton Filling:

Ingredients:

• 1-1 ½ lbs ground pork
• 4 green onions
• 6-9 fresh raw whole shrimp
• Sesame oil
• Garlic press
• 1-2 inches of ginger
• 1 ½ tbsp teriyaki sauce
• ½ tbsp soy sauce
• Garlic salt

Instructions:

• Dice green onions and discard ends
• Cut each shrimp into 9 pieces
• Kneed ground pork
• Kneed green onions into pork, eyeballing the amount of onion (you may not need to use all of the diced onion)
• Kneed shrimp in, mixing thoroughly with pork
• Drizzle sesame oil sparingly and kneed
• Cut and squeeze ginger in garlic press onto pork and kneed
• Drizzle teriyaki sauce over pork and kneed
• Drizzle soy sauce over pork and kneed
• Shake garlic salt onto pork and kneed

Wontons:

Ingredients:

• Wonton wrappers
• 1 egg

Instructions:

• Scramble egg into tiny bowl to use as a “glue” (traditionally, water is used. My grandma prefers egg.)
• Spoon a small amount of filling onto the middle of a wrapper
• Fold wrapper in half to make a triangle, making sure there are no air pockets and securing it with the egg
• Take the two corners on the longer end and connect them, securing them with the egg
• Be careful with the amount of filling and egg you use
  • Too little filling is unsatisfying while eating while too much can make the wonton fall apart
  • Too little egg causes the wonton to open up while too much makes the wrapper too slippery to stick together
• Repeat process until you run out of filling
• To cook the wontons, my grandma prefers to have a separate small pot of water boiling so the broth does not get too starchy
• Place wontons into boiling water and let them cook for around 5 minutes or until they float to the surface
• When cooked, place them into the broth
• Enjoy!

Katelyn Liu OC’26 is a second year Sociology and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies major with an interest in how food influences and is influenced by taste, culture, and community. They love to try new cafes and restaurants with friends!

Footnotes

1.  Harish Suvarna, “Exploring History of Dumplings and its Varieties Available Worldwide Now a Days,” International Journal of Advanced Research in Science, Communication and Technology 3, no. 5 (2023): 476. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4.  Yong Chen, “The Rise of Chinese Food in the United States,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, (2017), https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-273. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7.  Ray Oldenburg, “Chapter 2: The Character of Third Places,” in The Great Good Place (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 21. ↩︎
8.  Ibid., 22. ↩︎
9. Ibid., 26. ↩︎
10. Ibid., 32. ↩︎
11. Ibid., 33. ↩︎
12. Ibid., 36. ↩︎
13. Ibid., 38. ↩︎
14.  Chen, “The Rise of Chinese Food in the United States.” ↩︎
15.  Ibid. ↩︎
16.  Ibid. ↩︎
17.  Ibid. ↩︎
18.  Ibid. ↩︎
19.  Tammie G. Chen, “Homemade : an exploratory study on the impact of cooking on family relationships and cultural identity development,” Smith ScholarWorks, 2013. https://scholarworks.smith.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2154&context=theses. ↩︎
20. Ibid. ↩︎

Bibliography

Chen, Tammie G. ““Homemade : an exploratory study on the impact of cooking on family relationships and cultural identity development.” Smith ScholarWorks, (2013). https://scholarworks.smith.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2154&context=theses.

Chen, Yong. “The Rise of Chinese Food in the United States.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, (2017). https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-273.

Oldenburg, Ray. “Chapter 2: The Character of Third Places.” In The Great Good Place, 20-42. New York: Da Capo Press, 1989. 

Suvarna, Harish. “Exploring History of Dumplings and its Varieties Available Worldwide Now a Days.” International Journal of Advanced Research in Science, Communication and Technology 3, no. 5 (2023): 475-480.