I believe I've confessed that Shanghainese cuisine is not all that much to my liking. As with all good rules, however, there are exceptions. In this case, little meat-and-soup-stuffed exceptions.
Along with various seafood dishes (hairy crabs in the autumn), the fatty pork, and the overuse of sugar, salt, and oil, this part of China is also known for a couple kinds of dumplings: xiao long bao and sheng jian bao. They're both soup dumplings, but not the kind where the dumpling is served in soup -- in these cases, the broth is actually inside the dumpling. Both are traditionally made with pork, but you can sometimes get different meat or seafood fillings.
The little white bumps in the giant wok at the foreground of this picture are sheng jian bao. The outer skin is a thick dough; inside is a ground-pork meatball, and the resulting broth from its cooking inside the dough. The dumplings are both steamed and pan-fried, which means the dough is soft on top, crispy on bottom (and good for holding in the soup). The amount of soup in the dumpling is significant, or "enough to squirt all over your shirt if you're not paying attention."
The way most people eat both of these kinds of dumplings is to bite a small opening in the skin, let the steam escape and the soup cool a bit, and then consume. Biting straight into the dumpling usually results in either a seriously burned tongue, or soup flying in one or more directions (if you're lucky, merely leaking down onto your plate).
I took this photo on a food street where this little stall does so much business that it cloned itself, such that there are two of the same shop within about 20 metres of each other, both with long (but fast-moving!) lines. It takes the army of 5 or 6 dumpling makers behind the server to just about keep up with the pace of the line, but given the limited space in there (there's also the actual cook just to the right of the photo), it's a very smooth operation. And the dumplings are... mmmm, dumplings.
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