锅贴

The word 锅贴 breaks cleanly in two: 锅 (guō) is the wok or iron pan, and 贴 (tiē) means to stick or adhere. Together they describe the cooking method rather than the filling inside. The dumpling is placed in oil, given a splash of water, then left to steam and fry until its flat bottom bonds to the hot metal. The pan finishes the cooking; the cook only starts it.

Northern Chinese cooks in Beijing were making something very like guotie before the twentieth century, though the textual trail is thin before the Republican era. The method almost certainly evolved from jiaozi, the boiled dumpling, when a cook found that leftover jiaozi fried in a dry pan acquired a crackling underside the original method could not produce. By the 1920s, vendors near Tianqiao market in Beijing were selling them from flat iron pans, a few copper coins per plate.

The shape of the guotie also differs from the round jiaozi: it is elongated and open at both ends, which allows steam to escape and lets the filling caramelize at the tips. Some cooks seal the ends; some leave them open for that exposed crunch. In Beijing's food culture, the debate between these two camps is taken seriously.

In postwar Taiwan, Shanghainese and northern Chinese refugees carried the guotie southward, where it absorbed local flavors but kept its iron-pan discipline. Japanese gyoza descend from the same northern dumpling tradition, brought home by soldiers and civilians repatriated from Manchuria after 1945. The phrase pot sticker entered American English through Chinese restaurants in San Francisco and New York in the 1960s and 1970s, translating 锅贴 almost word for word.