![]() ![]() But it wasn’t until William’s brother, Tom, dropped some dim sims at a fish and chip shop in Mordialloc that things really took off. It was a big family business back then, supplying most of Melbourne’s Chinese restaurants. These were steamed meat bombs wrapped in a glutinous exoskeleton, “large enough to satisfy western appetites and strong enough to withstand freezing, reheating and transportation.” These weren’t the traditional, delicate yum cha variety, designed to ‘dot the heart’ without touching the stomach. In the early 1940s, William Young started a business, Wing Lee, opened a factory in Melbourne and started pumping out giant pork dumplings. “He took a traditional Chinese shumai dumpling and commercialised it.” “He didn’t really ‘invent’ them as such,” Angie says. We can pretty much take Angie’s words as dimmie gospel here, because her grandfather was William Chen Wing Young, the man that’s gone down in history as the inventor of the Australian dim sim way back in the 1940s. Although during the war years there wasn’t much pork around, so they were generally made of mutton.” “Pork and cabbage are the traditional mix,” says chef and culinary teacher Angie Chow. Pigeons and stray cats are often mentioned. You get the same kind of thing whenever people sit down and seriously think about chicken McNuggets – the mind tends to wander to ghoulish, unwholesome places. It’s a very Australian thing to speculate on the exact contents of a dim sim. ![]()
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