Newari Festival Icon · Rice Flour Dumpling

Yomari

Photo: Gaurav Dhwaj Khadka / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Its pinched, fig-like shape is deliberately half of a six-pointed symbol linked to Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of wisdom, and Newar families still fold thousands of them by hand each winter for a festival named directly after the dumpling.

Yomari is a steamed dumpling of glutinous rice-flour dough, pinched into a fig-like shape and filled with molasses and sesame or reduced milk for a sweet version, or minced buffalo meat for a savory one. Newari homes across the Kathmandu Valley make it by the batch, and valley sweet shops sell it year-round, with a surge each winter during the Yomari Punhi festival.

Why it's made this way: Newar legend credits a farming couple in ancient Panchal with first shaping yomari from a bumper rice harvest, and Yomari Punhi — a festival named directly after the dumpling — has marked that harvest with days of communal dumpling-making ever since.