This is a little broad, but if you ask around to Americans from different parts of the U.S., you’ll get wildly different answers as to what people consider to be default “Chinese food”.
To me (from the New Orleans suburbs), “Chinese food” conjures up a stock mental image of (a) pork fried rice paired with (b) a fried-bits-of-chicken dish (primarily Mandarin, Sweet & Sour, or General Tsao’s). Egg-drop soup and egg roll optional.
I’ve learned that a lot of other Americans, when they think “Chinese food”, they think of dim sum first, second, and third (true dim sum is virtually unknown locally). Still others can’t imagine “Chinese food” without noodles (usually something like chow mein or maybe chop suey). There are probably other variations.
Thick, flat, square dumplings are the only way to enjoy chicken and dumplings! That’s how I think of the food anyway. My grandma’s weren’t gummy, maybe hers were thinner or they soaked up more broth. I never understood why anyone would want biscuits in their chicken and dumplings.
I was about to ask Annie-Xmas if she was from central Pennsylvania; all of my Dad’s side of the family calls it “hamburg”. It’s the only part of the country where I’ve encountered that.
Ah, OK, makes sense then. The corn fritters I make are similar… more on the 1/2" end. Local pancakes tend (IME) to be more like the thin end of your scale down to something close to crepes.
“Dumpling,” to me, denotes any of a wide swath of culinary creations, all based on some sort of dough. When I think of “dumpling,” with no other description, I think of a fluffy ball of dough that ends up in your soup, or something akin to spaetzle or knödel. Stuffed dumplings are not my default. Plain dumplings are.
Per the OP, “goulash” would be one of those words. To me, it’s a somewhat specific Hungarian dish, basically a stew or soup based on meat, paprika, and onions. What people call “goulash” in the US seems to be a thrown-together dish of ground beef and noodles.
“Thuringer” is another one. My first experience with a sausage called “Thuringer” was the Thuringer Rostbratwurst of Germany. It’s a fresh sausage, stuffed into sheep’s casings (so, on the thin side), with a predominant marjoram and sweet spice (mace or nutmeg) sort of flavor to it. The sausage sold as “Thuringer” here is a smoked sausage, along the lines of a (smoked) Polish sausage.
When I think of blintzes, it’s always the dried cottage cheese-filled kind, not apple blintzes or cherry blintzes or whatever. Furthermore, the cheese filling is not sweetened, because that’s how my family has made it, even though it’s always sweetened at any restaurant.
Both my mom and I were born & raised in Pittsburgh, PA. I just asked my mother and she said it wasn’t a family thing, she never really cared very much for pancakes but likes corn fritters, so she began putting corn in the last few pancakes she’d make when she did a batch for me and my father, and she can enjoy them that way.
And around these parts, ground beef (usually with onion and green pepper in the saute) + macaroni + pasta sauce is called creole(d) macaroni.
