Above the Fold is investigating the tactile, intimate and labour-intensive art of dumpling making

Dumplings are the first food Leah Menneis loved to make as a child. An avid watcher of Martin Yan’s PBS show Yan Can Cook from a young age, the Brooklyn-based writer and designer eventually found her way (quite suitably) into the food journalism scene, first as a blogger for NBC, and then a food editor at Boston Magazine. The writer has since moved into the branded editorial space, but has kept a foot in the traditional journalism world as a freelance writer for magazines including Bon Appetit, Punch, and Lucky Peach.

Over the years of her career in food media, the writers love for dumplings has only grown, and her appreciation of the foodstuff “became accompanied by a deep respect for the people who make dumplings”, she shares. “They’re challenging things to make, and a true labor of love.” It wasn’t until lockdown that Leah started making dumplings herself with a bit more more frequency, as a way to pass the time and “self-soothe”, selling pierogi to friends and neighbours to fundraise during the pandemic.

Outside of this time spent in the kitchen, the creative went down a rabbit hole of dumpling content online: new and exciting small businesses, peoples passion projects and chefs that’ve pivoted their whole careers around these tiny parcels of joy. Keen to start something of her own from this research, the creative began a newsletter: Above The Fold – each instalment of which was based around a new interview with a dumpling maker. Around the same time Leah started Risograph printing classes at SVA Riso Lab in New York and was teaching herself Photoshop and Indesign, which birthed the idea to craft a print publication.

“Candidly, this project also came out of a conversation with my therapist,” Leah says. “When I was talking about feeling creatively blocked – she asked me what I would want to make even if no one ever saw it, something where the act of making something would be fulfilling in and of itself. My instinctual answer was ‘a publication about dumplings’.” Now, from her first print run a shot as a self-taught designer, to creating a beautiful ongoing zine series that centres “the people whose ideas, traditions, labor, and skill go into the craft of dumpling making”, Above the Fold is coming up to its third issue.

Moving from a newsletter to a printed zine, over the years the creative has made design decisions that create a conscious parallel between the publications content and its container. Dumplings are “petite”, Leah shares, “but also pack a big punch in both substance and flavour”. So it seemed logical for the designer to go for a small format with lots of bold, bright colours to create that same feeling. The layout for Above the Fold also pays homage to niche interest and hobbyist print publications from the 1970s and 80s, the creative tells us. “I spend a lot of time on eBay looking at and collecting titles like Rush (a magazine about drugs), Mother Earth (about homesteading), Monster Times (about horror movies), and, a personal favourite, the Nutshell News, a publication all about dollhouse collecting and building.”

Like Leah’s visual inspiration, the stories that have shaped the zines last two issues are eclectic . The Man vs. Meat Pie feature by Chris Jays in issue 2 was initially a self-published piece of writing that Leah came across on Reddit while researching Louisiana’s Natchitoches meat pies, that Chris then adapted for the zine. Other page turners were more serendipitous like the work of Claudiano.jpeg printed in issue 1: “I was on a trip to Bologna for a wedding a couple of summers back, when I noticed wheat-pasted collages on the sides of buildings of people with tortellini for heads, which lead me to discovering the work of the local artist,” Leah shares. Amongst many other editorial highlights so far, Leah has created a Dumplings of the USA map and a personal favourite of ours: A periodic table of Empanadas.

Putting all of these contributions into print has allowed Leah to feel “in a community with the people featured in the publication”, she says. Akin to making dumplings, making books by hand is an intimate and labour-intensive art that says “we ‘get’ what it’s like to choose to do it the hard way.” Running a one person show with her sister Rachel Mennei’s as her copy editor, Leah has been balancing everything from the research, writing, editing, design, print preparation, and more surrounding the zine since its early beginnings. “I’ve probably made a mistake in literally every single aspect of publishing at some point or another, and it’s been a tough pill to swallow getting used to that. But by doing it all, I’ve learned that I’m capable of bringing a creative project to fruition myself, which has felt immensely gratifying,” she ends. “You can’t get that perfect pleated dumpling without leaving a few hundred rough-around-the-edges ones in your wake [...] Luckily, the lumpy ones taste just as delicious.”