Sadly, as my family members grew older and schedules grew busier, we let this annual ritual fall by the wayside. I use “we” here, though in truth the decision was never up to me or any of the other men in my family, since we never participated in the work of making manti ourselves. When the women of our clan decided that they no longer had the time or energy to make manti for Christmas Eve, it was a sad but entirely understandable moment, in light of the labor involved.
Which is why I wanted to create a manti recipe for you here, to bring our family tradition back, even if only in recipe form. I used my Aunt Esther’s manti recipe as the inspiration and starting point for my own. I’ve streamlined her process slightly by turning to labor- and time-saving tools like a pasta roller and pressure cooker, and I’ve taken liberties with the dough formula a little, but for the most part I’ve tried to remain true to the spirit of her recipe, and the result.
As with all filled dumplings, manti are best made in a group setting, where the jobs of rolling, cutting, filling, and shaping can be shared among many people. For the time being, that’s obviously not an option, but I can say that during many rounds of recipe testing my wife and I had no problem making many hundreds of manti all on our own, just the two of us. Nor did we have any problem eating them all ourselves.
