Bibbidi bobbidi blumpia
Some dishes are more than mere food. They're bites of tradition, heritage and ancestry — a taste of magic, deep fried.
In any given family, certain dishes become magic.
They become more than mere food. They become legend, ancestry and diaspora rolled into a few delicious bites. The marker of celebration. The flavor of togetherness. A mother’s/lola’s/tito’s/cousin’s love on a plate.
In our family, that dish is lumpia.
And already, I’m distorting the specific magic of this specific dish.
We’ve never called lumpia, “lumpia.” When I first heard that word, when a friend of our mom’s said, “Please tell me she’s making her delicious lumpia for the potluck!” I had no idea what they meant: Loom-pee-huh? I was 22 and graduating from college.
We have always called lumpia, “egg rolls.” A tradition I assume started when my white-guy father told my Filipina mother no one in 1979 Fort Myers, Florida would have any earthly clue what to do with a “lumpia.” Or perhaps my fiercely stubborn mother saw the futility of calling anything by its actual Filipino name in 1979 Fort Myers, Florida, so she called it by what it most closely resembled: egg rolls. Kind of like the ones from Jackie’s or Tung Hing or any of the other Chinese takeout joints my mom clung to when she moved 9,200 miles from her Manila home.
“Egg rolls” are our family’s magic. As lumpia is for so many Filipino-American families. Whisper-thin rice paper fried till it shatters delicately against your teeth, exposing plump bellies of juicy meat — what’s not to love? Lumpia isn’t fishy like tuyo. It doesn’t require pork blood like dinuguan. It’s the taste of home no one will turn up their nose at, not even picky half-Filipino kids growing up in 1980s Southwest Florida.
How do you know your birthday’s coming? Egg rolls. Tita Perla’s getting married! Egg rolls! Emily got a 105 on the AP Euro quiz and you only got a 98?! No egg rolls.
Mom’s egg rolls formed and fried themselves the same way Cinderella’s dresses were made: with the help of thimble-wielding mice and plucky woodland creatures, or maybe courtesy a shimmering fairy godmother: bibbidi-bobbidi … blumpia!
For the 17½ years I lived at home, Mom’s egg rolls — just appeared. I’d be in my brother’s room playing “Sonic the Hedgehog,” and next thing we knew, we’d smell egg rolls frying and sneak out to the kitchen to grab as many as we could from her paper-towel lined Pyrex before she smacked us with her tongs.
As I’ve grown older, Mom’s egg rolls still — just appear. Primarily on my children’s birthdays, when they do what kids do best and beg their lola to work her magic.
I’ve made egg rolls on my own a few times, but the reviews were harsh.
“Didn’t you follow Lola’s recipe?” my son said as he tried not to spit out whatever egg-roll-ish thing I’d fed him.
“You mean, ‘Use good beef and add enough salt.’ That recipe? Because that’s all your lola told me.”
“Whatever. Hers are way better.”
“Yeah,” I sighed, “they are.”
As my mom’s grown older, she’s become more selective with this magic. She’ll moan when a grandchild asks for birthday egg rolls but agree to make them if given advance notice. For less-momentous occasions — my own birthday, say, or Baby Jesus’s — she’ll tell me she doesn’t have time to make egg rolls. My mother who’s retired and whose hobbies include Candy Crush and “Wheel of Fortune” … doesn’t have time? For egg rolls?
Turns out: Without a fairy godmother, egg rolls are a pain in the ass.
If I think honestly and undistordedly back to my childhood, I remember the big bowls of meaty filling, the carrots and onions that had to be minced, the paper-thin rice wrappers that had to be moistened and rolled and folded and pinched just so.
If I think harder, I remember Mom trying to enlist my help and me pretending not to hear her, shutting myself in my brother’s bedroom to play Sega. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water and seeing Mom hunched amid mountains of egg rolls because her nursing supervisor’s daughter was having a baby shower and heard Mom was a great cook.
At our own celebrations, the cakes were Duncan Hines and the chips were generic cheese poofs. But the egg rolls were all Mom.
As my daughter’s eighth birthday approached earlier this month, I texted my mother first: “Penelope wants egg rolls for her birthday. When can we make that work?”
“I NEED TWO WEEKS” Mom wrote back. “AT LEAST”
I told her that was doable, and that I would help however she needed it.
“DO YOU HAVE A MEAT GRINDER”
“Huh?”
“TO GRIND THE BEEF! I ALWAYS GRIND MY OWN BEEF YOU KNOW THAT”
Do I know that? Did I once know that? I honestly can’t remember.
“I don’t have a meat grinder, but I have a food processor,” I texted.
She never responded. Instead, a few days later, Mom showed up at my door holding $48 in freshly ground chuck that dribbled a bloody trail across my driveway.
“SAM’S HAD A SALE ON WHOLE CHUCK ROASTS FINALLY!” Mom yelled (being almost completely deaf, she speaks the same way she texts: IN ALL CAPS!).
“I FOUND MY GRINDER BY YOUR DAD’S RECORD PLAYER! YOU NEED TO FREEZE THAT! I’LL COME OVER AND WE CAN WRAP THE EGG ROLLS THE DAY BEFORE THE PARTY!”
And we did. We spent three painstaking hours rolling hundreds of the tiny, two-bite egg rolls my kids love. The ones that are all greasy crunch with just a wee pinch of beefy filling — which really is seasoned with little more than black pepper, garlic powder and “enough salt” to flavor not just the meat but also the wrappers.
My daughter helped for exactly four minutes. She wrapped one egg roll that fell apart on itself, then lost interest and skipped away to watch Netflix. I thought about calling her back, telling her how important it is to learn from her lola. But I knew better. Magic like this can’t be taught unless the student wants to learn.
Watching Mom make her egg rolls from start to finish, I realized there wasn’t much magic at play. Just some minced root vegetables, some freshly ground beef and a few hours bent over the kitchen counter repeating the same actions over and over and over until my mind and fingers went numb and my lower back throbbed.
Somewhere around egg roll 178, I asked Mom why she doesn’t call them lumpia.
“THESE ARE NOT LUMPIA,” she said. “LUMPIA ARE MADE WITH PORK.”
“Why don’t you use pork?”
“I DON’T LIKE GRINDING PORK, IT’S TOO FATTY.”
“So, you just decided to call them egg rolls? They’re really not like egg rolls, either.”
“WELL, THEY ARE DEFINITELY NOT LIKE LUMPIA!”
Our conversation raised so many questions. What did my lola’s lumpia taste like? And her lola’s? And her tita’s? What bits of their magic got left behind? Lost in this lumpia translation?
Knowing how Mom makes her lumpia, er, egg rolls, doesn’t make them any less magical to me. It’s only deepened that sense of wonder.
I’m still working up the courage to try my hand once again at solo egg rolls. Maybe the key is not calling them what Mom calls them. Maybe I’ll call them lola rolls or mom rolls — or (bibbidi-bobbidi) blumpia. Maybe one day my children will find magic in them. Or at least a sense of wonder as to their origin.
Recipe: Blumpia
This is my approximation at a recipe as formulated over 40-some years of watching from the sidelines. Give it a go, make some tweaks, develop your own magic.
Ingredients
1.5 pounds lean ground beef (if you need a meat grinder, I know a woman)
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 carrots, finely chopped
1-2 stalks of celery, finely chopped
2+ teaspoons of salt
2+ teaspoons of granulated garlic
freshly ground black pepper to taste
25 lumpia wrappers, ~8-inch square or round (If you can find actual lumpia wrappers at your Asian market: Awesome. If not, opt for “spring roll” wrappers like these. Be sure not to use wonton wrappers, they’re way too thick.)
1 small bowl of water for sealing the wrappers
1 quart peanut oil or other high-heat oil for frying
Directions
In a large bowl, use your hands to work together the beef, vegetables and seasonings until combined. Be careful not to overmix it. I like to take a pinch of the blended beef and cook it in a small pan to check the flavor. You want it to be a tad bit salty to compensate for the plainness of the wrappers.
Remove the wrappers from their packaging and place them on a plate under a clean, damp dish towel to keep them from drying out while you’re rolling (which can take hours). You have two options: 1. Leave the wrappers whole and roll long, thin egg rolls. 2. Cut the wrappers into fourths and roll maddeningly tiny little egg rolls that will drive you bonkers, but that I swear taste so much better (kids swear so, too).
To roll: Place a wrapper on a plate or cutting board and use the bowl of water to moisten the edges with your fingers. Take a pinch of meat no thicker than your thumb (too thick and you’ll end up with raw-meat rolls) and about 2/3 the width of the wrapper and place it on the near side of the wrapper. Fold that near side over the meat, then fold in the left and right edges and roll until sealed (as you would a burrito). Dab some water on the end to seal it.
We tend to wrap egg rolls the day before and then allow them to sit and dry sealed tight in the fridge. You can also go wild and make a bunch of extras that can be frozen for 3-6 months (or forever, if you’re my mom and don’t believe in the “Food & Drug Administration’s” so-called “guidelines”).
If you’re not making them in advance, give them an hour or so in the fridge so they’re not wet when you fry them. Wet egg rolls will spatter, burn you, explode at their seams and make a damn mess — none of which is good. Or tasty.
When ready to fry, heat oil to 375 degrees or until you can insert the end of a wooden spoon and see bubbles rapidly forming around it. If you opted for the large egg rolls, fry 2-3 at a time for 1-2 minutes per side or until golden brown. If you opted for smaller egg rolls, fry as many as can fit without overcrowding the pan, again for 1-2 minutes per side or until golden brown. Drain them on paper towels and serve while hot or store in a 225 degree oven until ready to eat.