Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Food & Drink

Musing and stress eating

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I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki ~ By Sehee Baek

(Anton Hur, trans., Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2022, ISBN# 978-1-5266-5086-3)

Review by Joanne Rhim Lee (Summer 2024)

The cheeky cover of Sehee Baek’s  I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki has a whimsical graphic novel-type illustration of a young woman laying face-down at the edge of her bed, huge bubble-sized tears being ejected from her eyes, while reaching out with her chopsticks for a delicious bowl of tteokbokki on the floor. It looks like she is in a momentary funk, and stress-eating the most delicious late-night snack in the world.

However, this playful cover design is a bit misleading, as readers soon learn. Baek struggles with dysthymia, or persistent mild depression, and her slim “therapy memoir” is a collection of her random musings and conversations with her psychiatrist. In the introduction, she explains that she wrote the book as a record of her struggles and her progress, with the hope of moving in a more positive direction.

Baek’s honesty about her depression is both disarming and refreshing at the same time. She shares quite personal details and dark emotions, and is unafraid of expressing her annoyance at other people who try to help her. “Sometimes, when someone tells me to ‘cheer up’ when I’m going through a tough time, I just want to wring their neck.”

Baek includes some simple and useful advice from her psychiatrist, words that all of us can benefit from. For example, Baek puts an inordinately high value on how other people perceive her, which sometimes leads her to spiralling into depression. Her psychiatrist points out that how she thinks about herself is far more important than what others think about her, and we then get to see how Baek does her best to apply this advice to her life in real time.

It’s hard to know exactly how to take in I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. Is the author being brutally honest about her depression, or is part of it performative? Does she really put her depressive thoughts on hold in order to eat tteokbokki? If she is really being honest, it is admirable that she’s putting herself out there and being vulnerable, but at the same time, don’t we all have these similar thoughts, wondering what people truly think of our work, and aren’t we all to some extent insecure about how we look or self-conscious about something dumb that we just said? Perhaps it is the novelty of her sharing of these musings that makes it a ground-breaking, clever book.

Baking a niche in Korea

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Korean adoptee opens Seoul bakery café specializing in authentic American treats | By Sara Salansky (Summer 2024)

SugaMama owner and master chef Christine Pennell with a slice of her traditional American apple pie and (right) tie-dye cupcakes.

American visitors to Korea hankering for a taste of home can find it at SugaMama, an American-style bakery café in Seoul.

The café began after owner Christine Pennell moved to Korea. She soon found that she hungered for the American-style baked treats she had always made for her children and friends, never realizing that her craving would blossom into a business. . After two meaningful trips to Korea, she moved there in 2020.  

She always wanted to live in Korea, and she also wanted to learn Korean and to find her birth parents. But the move soon became a more significant life change. Though “I didn’t say I moved here.  But now that I have a bakery, my kids say that I have to say I moved here, and so for three and a half years I have lived in Korea.”

“I knew I needed to do something for work in Korea,” Pennell said in explaining how the business got started. “I didn’t want to be an English teacher.  I was told that there was basically no authentic American baking in Korea, and when I’d go to bakeries, and wanted something with apples in it, there weren’t a lot of apples in it.”

Pennell said she wanted to get a sense of the demand for full-on American-style baking.  Living alone in Korea, she missed baking and cooking for people. In April 2022, she started baking in her apartment using a tabletop oven, and gave items away to test the market potential of various baked items.  She posted on a Facebook page intended for foreigners living in Korea (known as expatriates or expats) that she was giving away baked goods, and invited the group members to bring containers and try for free. At one point, a group member questioned her motives, after which the administrator of the group page told her not to advertise her free baked goods any more.

SugaMama Cafe in Seoul.

Despite being kicked off the group page, there was still demand for her baking.  Pennell’s next step was to find commercial kitchen space.  She struggled to keep up with weekly orders using the tiny oven in her apartment. In December 2022, she found an appropriate kitchen facility to lease.  

Pennell said that, at first, she was just baking items that were pre-ordered, but after a few months in the new commercial kitchen, she decided to decorate and furnish some space in the bakery with tables, chairs and a seating area so that people could sit down and enjoy a treat there.

Soon, Pennell and her daughter Victoria were working with shovels and saws, building three outdoor sitting areas with pergolas and flower beds.  During the heat of the summer in Korea, Pennell said, they were hard at work while the neighbors walked by wondering what was going on.  SugaMama bakery café opened officially on August 23, 2023.  

Without a persistent drive to live in Korea, this venture would never have happened. Pennell recalled that, for as far back as she could remember, she wanted to live in the country of her birth.  As a teen, this longing deepened.  She recalls having a fight with her parents, and her response was “I’m going to move to Korea!” She was not able to follow through on that desire for many years, but it was always there.  

Pennell said she also always wanted to find her birth mother. When she was 24, she started looking, but didn’t have enough money to go to Korea.  The adoption agency sent her a response of “there was no information on her family,” which was discouraging.

Pennell remembers a film she saw in 2017, Lion, Lion, based on the 2013 non-fiction book A Long Way Home, a true story of transnational adoptee Saroo Brierley, and how he sets out to find his birth family in India 25 years after being separated from them. The film inspired Pennell to continue to renew her search for her own birth family.   

In researching everything about the birth search process, Pennell discovered a social media group called Korean American Adoptees.  Through that page, she learned about a DNA match program that, sponsored by entrepreneur philanthropist Thomas Park Clement, through a DNA matching and search organization 325KAMRA. She got her first DNA kit free through the program.

Pennell visited Korea in 2018, her first time since she left the country in 1972. It was a three-week tour sponsored by her adoption agency.  In addition to seeing tourist sites, she visited Daegu, the city of her birth. She also rented a car and drove to some coastal areas of Korea. She returned to the U.S. even more determined to find a way to live in Korea.  

In 2019, Pennell found out through a DNA match that she had a sister who was adopted to a family in Belgium. The two met in Korea that same year.  She also found out that she could apply for dual Korean-U.S. citizenship, so she started that process. In June 2020, on her third trip back to Korea, she returned as a Korean citizen.   

In 2020, there were still many pandemic restrictions, but it was a perfect time to take a Korean language class on line, and study in her spare time. In October 2020, when all of the restrictions were lifted, she finally moved to Korea. 

What is unique about SugaMama? Pennell stresses that she is not a professional baker, but has been a home baker ever since she was a teenager. She loves to feed people; she is especially happy that she can provide Korean adoptees with a safe place for them to hang out, talk in English and eat some good food.

On the SugaMama menu: Meatball grinder with homemade meatballs, sauce and baguette and (right) lemon, strawberry and funfetti cupcakes.

Nothing suggests Asian fusion cuisine at SugaMama. It is authentically American, even the décor, and the products are organic and delicious. On the menu are favorite American treats like oatmeal dark chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter cookies, ginger snaps, and coconut macaroons. She also makes flavored breads such as banana bread and cinnamon rolls, as well as yeast bread, like baguettes and a sandwich roll.  Pies and cakes are also on the menu, along with several different sandwiches to eat in or take out, such as a meatball grinder, a sausage, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich, and a tuna melt. Pennell said the fastest-selling items are her apple pies and funfetti cupcakes. 

A recent menu item, New York style “everything” bagels and (right) a customer getting work done in the cafe.

Korean customers can’t pinpoint why the American desserts taste different from Korean desserts and typically ask her “how?”  She explains to them that she uses real ingredients like vanilla and sugar and cinnamon and real sprinkles that truly enhance the flavor of her desserts.  This makes sense to Korean home cooks – she sees their heads nodding with understanding.   

Pennell said she is happy to take requests for orders of things that are not on the menu. She will research recipes and make the item, provided she can find all of the ingredients, which is hard sometimes in Korea.

Pennell understands the link between food and feelings of home, and said she knows these feelings can be difficult for adoptees, especially those who are in Korea and do not yet know the people or culture.  It can be very emotional, and sometimes lonely.   

Her advice to those on the fence about moving to Korea is that a healthy perspective is the key to a positive experience. She asks the question “Are you moving because you think it will fulfill you, or you want to experience something different and new, or are you wanting to move because you hate being at home?”

Another piece of advice – the more Korean language instruction and practice, the better, since overcoming the language barrier is difficult. To communicate accurately, it may be necessary for newcomers to use the translation app on their phones “and that’s OK,” she added.  

As hard as it is for American entrepreneurs to start a business in the U.S., not knowing the culture and doing business in a second language exacerbates all of those challenges in Korea.  Pennell said success depends on “true friends” in Korea who can be trusted to help with the process.

SugaMama is located in the Gangseo-gu, Deungchon-dang neighborhood of Seoul, and directions are included on the SugaMama website: https://www.sugamamakorea.com.  There is also a Facebook page and an Instagram page with delicious photos of food at: sugamama_korea.  

SugaMama staff: Jihyun Im, Christine Pennell and Dongmi Suh present three apple pie variations, crumble, lattice top and full coverage top. At right, Pennell samples a slice of the lattice top. .

Food and Drink

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Author Interview: Minnesota anthologist collects stories from immigrants on the foods of their native land | By Martha Vickery (Summer 2021 issue)

Sun Yung Shin and What We Hunger For.

The food of one’s native land means love, home, nurture, healing. But it is trickier than that, especially for immigrants. It also involves generational and cultural trauma, grief, loss, abandonment, and sometimes, with persistence, reconciliation.  

The ways in which immigrants and refugees treasure, forget, or bury the memories of a left-behind culture, and the role of food in hanging onto, however tenuously, one’s culture of origin, is a central theme of 14 nuanced stories by Minnesotan writers of color in the anthology What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family, edited by Minnesota poet, author and editor Sun Yung Shin. Some contributors to this collection are immigrants, other are the children and grandchildren of those who were refugees from their homelands.

A Korean adoptee, Shin embraces Minnesota life as a theme through this anthology, as well as in the 2016 essay collection she edited, A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota.  She has also published two poetry collections of her own work with a third on the way, and edited the anthology Outsiders Within: Writings on Transracial Adoption.

That the contributors in What We Hunger For are all Minnesotans was partly happenstance; immigrants have many common experiences no matter where they live, she observed.  It is a universal book overall, but its Minnesota references to iconic places, foods and symbols, such as the State Fair butter sculpture competition Princess Kay of the Milky Way, lend a touch of the familiar (and sometimes zany) for Minnesota readers. It also describes the diversity of today’s Minnesotans. A Good Time for the Truth and What We Hunger For were both printed by Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Shin said she wanted to produce the kind of book she wanted to read, but could not find. “There are plenty of books by professional chefs and food writers.  I wanted to do something different that I would be able to do,” she said.  “I wanted it to be good writing by people like me; people who are interested in looking through the lens of food at the refugee and immigrant American experience,” but not necessarily from a food professional’s point of view.

The editor cited many layers of life experience that led her to this topic, from raising and feeding two children (now 20 and 24), to growing awareness of society’s disconnect with the earth and where food comes from, and a year-long class on permaculture she has taken recently. She got interested in food sovereignty, sparked by a trip in 2007 with the Korean American organization Nodutdol, which brings groups to visit South Korean farming and food cooperatives to learn about labor rights, demilitarization, women’s and LGBTQ rights, and the longstanding stable, local, organic food movement there. 

Shin recalls going to Pyongtaek during that trip, where farmers whose families farmed the same land for many generations were displaced to make way for a U.S. military base. “It was a profound experience for me be there and see how the military has murdered nature and has taken the livelihood and traditions of these people,” she said. As an immigrant Korean adoptee, she said, “I had never been part of an invitation to have a relationship with a place.” Any such relationship is complicated by “the racism and xenophobia in the U.S. and the belonging in general, let alone [belonging to] the cycles of a place,” she added.

Shin said her family always had a garden, so she grew up with awareness about growing vegetables.  While working on A Good Time for the Truth, she said, she was struck by an essay by activist Diane Wilson (who contributed the essay Seeds for Seven Generations), which described urban native children “who don’t even know that food comes from the ground.” Working with Wilson on various projects, Shin said it impressed upon her how critical it is to restore a right relationship with the earth.

In accepting promised stories for the book, “I had no idea what people would say,” she said.  “I was just really interested in what they want to say about food. She was looking for a nuanced view, she said, “rather than ephemeral Twitter conversations, or professional journalists writing in food magazines.”

She encouraged each of the contributors to dig in and get at “what regular people are thinking – what are we dealing with?” And in regard to food, “what does this have to do with our grief and longing and our mixed feelings about it?”

It was a lot to ask of writers at that time, for just a small honorarium, Shin said. It was the pandemic, people had a lot to do, and to worry about. Most were writers with full careers; Shin hopes to offer some of the available writers opportunities to engage with readers at reading events, as a way to give something back.  

Shin said talked with each writer about how she wanted a final product that avoided any ephemeral descriptions of cultural food traditions. She steered writers from any romance, or tourism-oriented notions about food, and specified that it would not be a recipe book, although the anthology includes a few approximate (and often humorously vague) recipes and descriptions of how the writers or their loved ones make a favorite dish.

V.V. Ganashanathan’s The Measurements, is about how, paradoxically, there are no measurements. His hard-won “recipe” for curry chicken is more about how it is important to watch and learn one’s culture and its food, rather than imitate it with a recipe. With his mom’s help, and a technological boost from video calls, he eventually assembles a kind of recipe that includes a pinch of this and that, and “an arbitrary amount” of everything else needed to make an adequate curry.

Some of the writers in the anthology seem confident in carrying forth their homeland food traditions, such as Ugandan American reporter/storyteller Senah Yaboah-Sampong. He writes of how immigrants are challenging mainstream narratives of food and culture “with the complexity and dynamism we feed to one another and season to suit our palates. We learned from watching our parents in the kitchen. It is what we’re made of.”

Just as interesting as the confident foodies are the essayists who seldom or never watched parents or other family cooks in the kitchen, either because they rejected the cultural knowledge offered to them, or never had a chance to absorb it.  Some are annoyed at the paltry food knowledge left to them by their immigrant forebears. 

Lina Jamoul

Writer Lina Jamoul, in her Fragments of Food Memories; or Love Letter to My Dad, blames her limited recipes on her parents’ steely non-conformism. While her father prided himself in rejecting Syrian/Arabic traditions of patriarchy, “my mom took pride in saying she didn’t like to cook – almost as much pride as my dad took in being a good cook.” Illogically, her mother later told her that she was also proud of putting home-cooked meals on the table even though she hated to cook. She was “simultaneously proud of these two different facts that seemed to contradict each other.”

May Lee-Vang

The anthology also includes Hmong American writers, members of the Twin Cities most populous Asian American group. Writer May Lee-Vang reports that she somehow failed to absorb Hmong folk traditions. As a teen, she disliked having to attend various traditional ceremonies, although she loved the special food. She describes arriving at adulthood, suspecting she is ignorant of cultural knowledge that may be important to know. She knows what dishes go with what ceremony but admits to not knowing exactly what the ceremonies are about.

At the end of the story, at around age 40, Lee-Vang finds herself at such a ceremony for her dad after his death, surrounded by food, wondering if her dad has successfully crossed over, as the ceremony has promised.  There are no elders to ask, with parents and grandparents dead, others absent. She remarks to her husband that there are no old people present. “We are the old people,” he tells her.

Shin observed about this and other stories, that there is a phenomenon of immigrant elders dying young, many before their adult children have a chance to benefit from their memories and accumulated knowledge. Dislocation, trauma, hard work and poverty often take their toll on the immigrant generation, she said.

Kou B. Thao

Kou B. Thao, described in his bio as a Hmong healer, writes how hot short-grain rice doused with cold water, a children’s dish in his culture, is still soul food to him. In a very vulnerable essay, he describes a turbulent youth during which he and his siblings experienced food deprivation, followed by too much staying at home alone, and too many junk food meals, while his parents worked at numerous jobs. His weight grew as he approached puberty; he also realized he was gay.

His father’s stories of a painful past during wartime were “weapons of guilt” for Thao and his siblings as children. Only when older did the writer understand that “my parents were the ones assaulted by guilt, stemming from not being able to provide food for my siblings during those difficult times.” Thao writes that his relationship with food was healed in Thailand, while working for a non-profit Hmong youth outreach organization. Food was special, it built community, brought joy, reinforced to him the radical hospitality of his culture, and “I finally learned what it meant to be Hmong.”

Shin thrives on variety; her latest book, The Wet Hex, was recently published. She is also co-authoring a children’s book with Diane Wilson and two other authors, Where We Come From, about forced migration, enslavement, and other historic human rights topics.  Currently she teaches an Asian American film class at the University of Minnesota, and next year will be a visiting distinguished professor at Carleton College in Northfield.

Shin admits to being addicted to anthologies. “I am always delighted, astonished, humbled and intensely interested in writers’ stories,” she said. “And even if you know somebody really well, you don’t get to ever just listen to someone one hour straight. That’s the great thing about a personal essay. They unspool their story, and you can just listen.”  

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Food and roots

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How home cooking brings comfort and a sense of belonging | By Suni Miller Zmich (Spring 2022 issue)

Kimjang (김장) Photo by Stephen Wunrow

According to my infant medical records, when I was nearly a year old, I only weighed eight pounds – the same as my oldest daughter’s birthweight.

I am a Korean adoptee, but my parents rarely acknowledged my Koreaness as a child because I rejected it when they tried. I remember eating Korean food only twice during my childhood, but I loved the traditional Jewish and southern food that came with my family. Surely, my need to savor was brought on by the malnourishment I endured as an infant.

Food is primal for me, probably because of my rough start in life. It is my obsession.

Recently, I drove home with two-and-a-half gallons of kimchi, sporting red splatters on my coat from the gochugaru (Korean red chili powder) mixture, looking like a victorious paintball player. Over my lifetime, as a Korean adoptee in a white family, I haven’t known many other Koreans, and have had very few chances to be in a close community with any. For much of my life, I felt very white, despite what the mirror (and others) told me every day.

Kimchi making in Jeollanamdo. Photos by Stephen Wunrow

Serendipitously, I had been invited to a kimjang – a traditional collective making of kimchi. The energetic group of ladies at the event were welcoming as we gathered outside. A few were “Korean-Koreans” (i.e., Korean immigrants who have been making kimchi since childhood), but most were Korean adoptees like me. As we chopped vegetables and mixed the ingredients with our gloved hands, camaraderie and obscene amounts of garlic were enfolded into the concoction. We joked about motherhood and Asian babysitters – sending us into fits of laughter.

Afterwards, I wondered if acceptance is exactly what the kimjang tradition was meant to nurture – a time when Koreans are unguarded and understood. Being included brought a sense of completeness that I subconsciously searched for my entire life (not to take an inch away from my American family’s Jewish and redneck traditions). As a nomadic Army brat, I never knew that Korean adoptee communities existed in America until recently.

Last year, when I spoke to Joy H., one of the interviewees for my book, Through the Lens of Ourselves, she described a “subtle internal click” that happened when she met her Polish biological family. A significant portion of our conversation was dedicated to nuanced Polish recipes. Her newfound heritage has given her an excuse to eat kielbasa, the sausage she loved her whole life. The completeness she felt washed over me as she talked about her birth father’s family Christmas tradition of making pierogis (think: flat half-moon shaped ravioli boiled and sautéed in butter and garlic).

Reflecting on my satisfying kimjang day, I thought “Now I get it.” My “click” was raucous and permeating. Who would have thought that kimchi could not only be healing for my digestive system, but also for my soul? I knew also that it was not just the kimchi produced, but that the satisfaction came from doing something so basically Korean with other Korean people, and the acceptance I felt from that gathering.

Food has always been central to my family. From my adoptive Jewish family on my mother’s side, I learned about the healing properties of matzo ball soup, the equivalent of American chicken soup. My beloved grandmother taught me an adaptation of the traditional recipe. After cooking the stock for hours, she would mash the vegetables and garlic through a colander, returning them to the pot to create a thicker and more rustic soup. Traditionalists say that the vegetables are “spent” after boiling them and should be discarded. I disagree. They still offer textural and visual value. The miniature pieces of carrots lend a welcoming rich color to the dish and create a comforting and substantial mouthful.

Similarly, years later, when I tried the Korean soup yukgaejang for the first time, I immediately understood it to be the equivalent to matzo ball soup. The bold reddish color reminded me of an amped up version of my grandmother’s recipe. The beef bones are simmered for hours with vegetables to slowly develop a depth of flavor.

I have had both soups at different times when I’ve been under the weather. The matzo ball soup reminds me that I am loved by my Jewish family. The yukgaejang makes me feel better physically and simultaneously reminds me of how I yearn for familial tradition. The flavors are addictive, and the experience is psychologically familiar. The taste is of something I once lost as an infant and now rediscovered through my senses.  The spiciness of the broth opens my sinuses, allowing me to breathe both literally and metaphorically. I can taste the minerals from the shiitake mushrooms – almost as if they were plucked from Asian soil, giving me a glimpse into the lives of my ancestors. I can picture my Jewish grandmother having tea with those ancestors in the afterlife.

My aunt once told me that after my parents adopted me, my grandmother became obsessed with all things Asian. Even though I spent a lifetime often feeling out of place due to my adoption, the time spent with my grandmother was the exception. Being with her, and in her house, was always a homecoming experience. Our relationship revolved around food – she would take me to fancy restaurants – just the two of us.

The heart of her house was a supersized gourmet kitchen, complete with two types of grills, two sinks, state of the art appliances, and matzo ball soup made with love. At one point, she gave me her porcelain china and formal dining room furniture – they are now beautiful antiques. Her spirit joins us at the table for holiday meals, as we sip from Limoges teacups painted with Asian designs. When I open the cabinet doors, I swear I can smell her house and the hundreds of meals she served.

Recently, a friend and I joked about how I lucked out having a Jewish family, since Jewish and Korean cultures share so many values. Both cultures carve out distinct divisions between right and wrong, and coloring outside moral lines is not negotiable. Righteous outrage at injustice is expected. Education is paramount. But it is our love of food that brings Jewish and Korean family members back to the table over and over.

In contrast to my mother’s Jewish family, my dad’s family members are self-proclaimed rednecks (of the Appalachian hillbilly variety). Growing up, my mom and dad used to joke about how “red” his neck was. When I was a child, I thought they were referring to his skin color because he has some Cherokee roots, and his neck is tinged with red undertones that are pronounced when he tans.

From my redneck relatives, I learned about the importance of slow-cooked grits and the joy of biscuits made from scratch. I remember my dad fondly talking about visiting his grandfather in coal-country Kentucky. They would have a grand-slam breakfast before a full day of manual labor, fueling up to make it through the workday. It recently occurred to me that the love needed to create country home-cooked breakfasts is not unlike the soulful effort put into kimchi-making. Kentucky breakfasts are made to last through long workdays. Kimchi is created to last for months. Both are made with love and intention. Both are shared rituals.

For most of my lifetime, I wasn’t so sure that my redneck sensibilities fit well with my Korean roots. However, I have come to the conclusion that when it comes to our attitudes about food, we match. Whenever I would visit my dad’s parents, Granny would stuff me with American junk food, potatoes and gravy, and packaged white bread slathered with butter. As we left, she would insist I take a handful of candy bars for my trip home. Proffering food was her version of love. As an adoptee, I think I somehow understood that, never turning down a serving.

When my Jewish grandmother learned about the non-nutritious food I indulged in while at Granny’s house, she was aghast, telling me I needed to say “no thank you.” I never did. How could I reject someone’s love when that’s what I craved my entire life?

My obsession with food is probably a big part of why I fell in love with my husband. When we dated, he cooked for me, and when I had his garlic-forward alfredo sauce for the first time, I knew I was in trouble. He cooks about 90 percent of our dinners, and for 32 years he has shown me his love over and over.

As young adults, my husband and I gravitated towards the European peasant cuisines rich in aromatics. As we developed our palates, I realized garlic was the constant thread in our adventures. As we moved across culinary continents, our exploration of Asia brought us to Korean cuisine, lured by its abundant use of garlic and spice.

As child, I loved when others cooked for me – it gave me a sense of belonging. As an adult, I still love being fed, but I love to cook for others too. Breakfast is my favorite meal to make for my daughters – certainly a vestige of my redneck heritage. Fill ‘em up before sending them out into the world.

My daughters are now busy adults and come home when they can. We are all looking forward to our next visit because I bought large kitschy glass containers which will be transformed into kimchi jars. My girls are excited to participate in our first family kimchi-making party, a kimjang. And I am equally excited to nourish their souls with the Korean tradition of love.

Poop, as celebrated in Korea

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From street snacks to museums, Koreans exhibit characteristic humor about the basics | Food column by Mary Lee Vance (Spring 2022 issue)

Getting poop bread at Insadong.

There’s nothing like being in Korea to desensitize you to poop-related topics.  The desensitizing was never necessary for me, however.  I am a disabled person, a post-polio survivor, and someone who is professionally connected to ensuring locations and events are accessible for disabled participants.  Therefore, I have seen more than my fair share of toilets, for both men and women.

As a well-travelled person, I also have memories of more than my fair share of unique toilet stories and experiences.  I used the primitive squat toilets, outhouses, and dirt holes in the ground.  I have also sat in contraptions that look like Captain Kirk’s chair, with a gazillion options to spritz water, spray perfume, blow hot air and do other things like play music so no one outside the bathroom can hear the noises you might be making while doing your business.  I have developed a fascination for toilets.  More importantly, my career has been focused on equal access to toilets and other essential facilities for human beings.

It is hard to believe that in my past trips to South Korea, I somehow missed the now-famous poop emoji, and failed to notice the good-natured South Korean approach to poop-related topics.  The more I learn about Korea, the more I have delved into and appreciated some of the quirky sides of my motherland. 

Instead of one of my usual more conventional Korean cuisine narratives in this space, readers this time will need to go full circle with the with the digestive system.  But bear with me — it is a fun topic.

Few non-Koreans are aware that Koreans are fascinated by all things related to poop.  But, for unknown reasons, they are.  For example, Korean superstition apparently holds that dreaming about poo means the dreamer will get wealthy.

In the West, poop topics are generally avoided.  We are all vaguely aware that if a few days have gone by without a healthy bowel movement, we feel uncomfortable.  The opposite condition is also uncomfortable. Beyond that base level knowledge is a world of information that most of us don’t want to know about or talk about, but nonetheless it exists.

A trip to Poopoo Land

That’s why a trip to Poopoo Land should be on everyone’s South Korea travel itinerary.  It is a  three-story museum in the city of Busan that showcases items like urinals, various kinds of toilet paper, a poo-poo obstacle course and other exhibits that provide larger-than-life simulations of the digestive system and anything else related to fecal matter. Overall, it is a fun, borderline-bizarre experience and perfect for funny photos; there are areas where people can pose in front of bare butts, toilets, and of course, many varieties of poo.

This museum is a real winner for small boys and men who seem particularly attracted to anything related to passing gas, a theme that Poopoo Land also explores, in technicolor.  This place is so popular, it is listed in official travel guides.

Mr. Toilet House in Seoul.

HQ of the toilet pioneer

Another must-see attraction is the theme park called Mr. Toilet House that, in addition to housing a wide variety of toilets, European bedpans, ancient flush toilets and other toilet and pre-toilet inventions, also provides unique poop-related history. Starting with the entrance, visitors are greeted by a huge gold turd and statues of larger-than-life-size adults and children squatting and standing in various positions for pooping or peeing.

The golden turd at the Mr. Toilet House in Seoul.

The back story is that the museum was built by one Jae-duck Sim (now known as Mr. Toilet), who apparently started life by being born in an outdoor toilet. He later made a career in plumbing, public bathrooms and toilet sanitation.  His particular interest was in improving public toilets in advance of such international events as the 1988 Olympics and the 2002 World Cup soccer championship.  He founded the Korean Toilet Association and co-founded the World Toilet Association.  He is also a former mayor of Suwon.

His guiding philosophy was that all humans had a right to clean and safe toilets, and that children, the disabled and elderly must be able to access and use toilets equally.  This humble cause, the right to for all people to equally access toilets, is reinforced for me each time I fly into the modern Incheon International Airport. I see Sim’s cause in action in its clean, modern rest rooms.  The accessible units are spacious for families with children and luggage (and in my case my mobility scooter), equipped with sturdy grab bars, accessible sinks and lots of space to navigate around. There is not only an adult-sized toilet but also a fully-functioning toilet that is lower to the floor and accessible for a child or a small adult.  

As a disabled traveler with post-polio paralysis of both legs, I struggled with the squat toilets that are common in most South Korean public restrooms.  But, one day an elderly woman beckoned for me to follow her as I entered a restroom and was heading to a stall with a squat toilet. She led me down the row of stalls and stopped in front of the last one, which miracle of miracles, contained a Western-style toilet.  Ever since then, I do an inventory when in South Korean public restrooms and I can usually find the special stall with the Western toilet.  We have Mr. Toilet’s vision to thank for this form of public toilet equity.

The Mr. Toilet House museum logically, is shaped like a toilet, and was once the site of Mr. Toilet’s home.  Being the toilet-minded person that he was, Mr. Toilet made the showpiece of this museum a roomy modern bathroom, installed in the center of the ground floor, behind a full-length glass wall so that anyone using the toilet could see anyone in the adjacent room (and vice versa).  Fortunately, there is also a switch that turns the glass opaque when a user needs privacy.

The Korea Record Institute identifies the museum as the largest toilet sculpture.  On the grounds are various statues of people squatting or standing, preparing to poop or pee, including statues of the mascot, named Toile.  A primary message of the museum is that bodily functions are to be celebrated.  Along with other toilet trivia, a little-known one is that on Jeju Island, there is a pork delicacy made from poop-eating pigs.

If all this poop talk is making you hungry, there is a café called Ddo-Ong Café that serves everything with a toilet theme.  Coffee is served in toilet shaped mugs, miniature plungers decorate the walls, squat toilets are placed strategically around the grounds for patrons to take selfies, and there are displays of dolls that poop and fart.

At the café, and in many places in larger cities, are food stalls that capitalize on the poop topic with poop bread, a variation of the hotteok.  The hotteok, a popular traditional street food, is a raised dough with a cinnamon filling, grilled on both sides like a pancake. 

Ddongbang has similar ingredients, but it is cooked inside a special mold, more like bungeopang, the fish-shaped traditional street snack.  On the cold streets, the smell of these treats on the grill, often flavored with vanilla or cinnamon, is like the smell of pancakes outdoors at a camp fire — in other words, almost irresistible. Ddongbang, is (not surprisingly) shaped like a mound of poo.  It may be the shape the famous poop emoji came from.  It is flavored with various fillings, including melted chocolate (logical!) or the traditional sweet red bean paste with walnuts.  One location for the ddongbang snack is a place called Ddongah Hotteok in Insadong, but vendors can be found at tourist attractions, bus stops, car rest stops and underground subway shopping areas.

As a hair-raising aside, there is a little-known Korean product, actually a traditional medicine, that is made using human poo. The poo apparently has to come from a child between age four and seven (considered the optimal age for pure poo, who knew?).  The poo is then mixed with water, rice, and yeast and fermented.  It is known as ttongsul, Korean wine with child feces, and is traditionally used for lower back pain, broken bones and other ailments.  It is seldom used any more; most younger Koreans have never heard of the product.

Of course, all kinds of fecal matter, human and animal, is used as fertilizer for the food we eat, then poop out again; that is one of the basics of traditional, sustainable farming.  The full circle of food includes how plants need composted plant and animal waste to live; and how animals need plant products to live.   Koreans just have more light-hearted frankness about the subject than Westerners do.  

Making poop bread at home

To make an authentic poop bread requires a poop-shaped iron (this would take some online research and ordering).  However, ordinary stuffed snack breads only require some kind of a bubble iron.  Although I searched in vain for a poop bread recipe, my research indicates that a close variation in terms of ingredients would be Korean walnut-shaped treats stuffed with sweet red bean paste and chopped walnuts and then baked in an iron mold.  In Korea, this bite-sized snack is shaped like a walnut shell and called hodo or hodo kwaja.

This recipe is geared to the cook times for very small snacks.  When using a larger mold, a longer and slower cook time per side is needed.

Walnut bread street snack (hodo kwaja)

Batter ingredients:
1 C plain flour, sifted
2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
1 C.water or milk
3 T. castor sugar (raw)
1 T. melted butter
1 egg Filling

Ingredients:
1 can (or package) sweetened red bean paste.  Use about 1/2 t. per pastry for a small mold, up to 2 t. for a larger mold.
15 walnuts, shelled and broken into into smaller pieces to fit into the mold

Other ingredients:
1 T. melted butter or neutral tasting oil for cooking

Method: 
1.  Combine all batter ingredients in a medium-size bowl and mix well.  Transfer the mixture into a container with a spout for easy pouring.
2.  Preheat a walnut cake mold (or round bubble mold) over low heat.  Quickly brush both sides of the pan with some melted butter or cooking oil.
3.  Pour the batter mixture onto the mold, covering about 60 percent of the pan.  Add the red bean paste and walnuts then add more batter mixture on top to cover the walnut filling.  Do not overfill.  Batter can drip onto the burner and immediately burn, creating a cleaning hassle.  After cooking side one, turn the mold, and increase heat to medium-low to cook side two.
4.  Check pastry for doneness, cooking both sides of the mold until the pastry turns golden brown (about four minutes per side for a small mold, longer for a larger mold).  Remove the pastry from the mold and cool down briefly on a rack.  Trim the edges of each pastry with scissors to make the edges even.
5.  Repeat the steps 2 to 4 until batter is gone.  Serve while still warm or at room temperature within 24 hours. 

Home cooking

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Author Interview: Minnesota anthologist collects stories from immigrants on the foods of their native land | By Martha Vickery (Summer 2021 issue)

Sun Yung Shin and What We Hunger For.

The food of one’s native land means love, home, nurture, healing. But it is trickier than that, especially for immigrants. It also involves generational and cultural trauma, grief, loss, abandonment, and sometimes, with persistence, reconciliation.  

The ways in which immigrants and refugees treasure, forget, or bury the memories of a left-behind culture, and the role of food in hanging onto, however tenuously, one’s culture of origin, is a central theme of 14 nuanced stories by Minnesotan writers of color in the anthology What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family, edited by Minnesota poet, author and editor Sun Yung Shin. Some contributors to this collection are immigrants, other are the children and grandchildren of those who were refugees from their homelands.

A Korean adoptee, Shin embraces Minnesota life as a theme through this anthology, as well as in the 2016 essay collection she edited, A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota.  She has also published two poetry collections of her own work with a third on the way, and edited the anthology Outsiders Within: Writings on Transracial Adoption.

That the contributors in What We Hunger For are all Minnesotans was partly happenstance; immigrants have many common experiences no matter where they live, she observed.  It is a universal book overall, but its Minnesota references to iconic places, foods and symbols, such as the State Fair butter sculpture competition Princess Kay of the Milky Way, lend a touch of the familiar (and sometimes zany) for Minnesota readers. It also describes the diversity of today’s Minnesotans. A Good Time for the Truth and What We Hunger For were both printed by Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Shin said she wanted to produce the kind of book she wanted to read, but could not find. “There are plenty of books by professional chefs and food writers.  I wanted to do something different that I would be able to do,” she said.  “I wanted it to be good writing by people like me; people who are interested in looking through the lens of food at the refugee and immigrant American experience,” but not necessarily from a food professional’s point of view.

The editor cited many layers of life experience that led her to this topic, from raising and feeding two children (now 20 and 24), to growing awareness of society’s disconnect with the earth and where food comes from, and a year-long class on permaculture she has taken recently. She got interested in food sovereignty, sparked by a trip in 2007 with the Korean American organization Nodutdol, which brings groups to visit South Korean farming and food cooperatives to learn about labor rights, demilitarization, women’s and LGBTQ rights, and the longstanding stable, local, organic food movement there. 

Shin recalls going to Pyongtaek during that trip, where farmers whose families farmed the same land for many generations were displaced to make way for a U.S. military base. “It was a profound experience for me be there and see how the military has murdered nature and has taken the livelihood and traditions of these people,” she said. As an immigrant Korean adoptee, she said, “I had never been part of an invitation to have a relationship with a place.” Any such relationship is complicated by “the racism and xenophobia in the U.S. and the belonging in general, let alone [belonging to] the cycles of a place,” she added.

Shin said her family always had a garden, so she grew up with awareness about growing vegetables.  While working on A Good Time for the Truth, she said, she was struck by an essay by activist Diane Wilson (who contributed the essay Seeds for Seven Generations), which described urban native children “who don’t even know that food comes from the ground.” Working with Wilson on various projects, Shin said it impressed upon her how critical it is to restore a right relationship with the earth.

In accepting promised stories for the book, “I had no idea what people would say,” she said.  “I was just really interested in what they want to say about food. She was looking for a nuanced view, she said, “rather than ephemeral Twitter conversations, or professional journalists writing in food magazines.”

She encouraged each of the contributors to dig in and get at “what regular people are thinking – what are we dealing with?” And in regard to food, “what does this have to do with our grief and longing and our mixed feelings about it?”

It was a lot to ask of writers at that time, for just a small honorarium, Shin said. It was the pandemic, people had a lot to do, and to worry about. Most were writers with full careers; Shin hopes to offer some of the available writers opportunities to engage with readers at reading events, as a way to give something back.  

Shin said talked with each writer about how she wanted a final product that avoided any ephemeral descriptions of cultural food traditions. She steered writers from any romance, or tourism-oriented notions about food, and specified that it would not be a recipe book, although the anthology includes a few approximate (and often humorously vague) recipes and descriptions of how the writers or their loved ones make a favorite dish.

V.V. Ganashanathan’s The Measurements, is about how, paradoxically, there are no measurements. His hard-won “recipe” for curry chicken is more about how it is important to watch and learn one’s culture and its food, rather than imitate it with a recipe. With his mom’s help, and a technological boost from video calls, he eventually assembles a kind of recipe that includes a pinch of this and that, and “an arbitrary amount” of everything else needed to make an adequate curry.

Some of the writers in the anthology seem confident in carrying forth their homeland food traditions, such as Ugandan American reporter/storyteller Senah Yaboah-Sampong. He writes of how immigrants are challenging mainstream narratives of food and culture “with the complexity and dynamism we feed to one another and season to suit our palates. We learned from watching our parents in the kitchen. It is what we’re made of.”

Just as interesting as the confident foodies are the essayists who seldom or never watched parents or other family cooks in the kitchen, either because they rejected the cultural knowledge offered to them, or never had a chance to absorb it.  Some are annoyed at the paltry food knowledge left to them by their immigrant forebears. 

Lina Jamoul

Writer Lina Jamoul, in her Fragments of Food Memories; or Love Letter to My Dad, blames her limited recipes on her parents’ steely non-conformism. While her father prided himself in rejecting Syrian/Arabic traditions of patriarchy, “my mom took pride in saying she didn’t like to cook – almost as much pride as my dad took in being a good cook.” Illogically, her mother later told her that she was also proud of putting home-cooked meals on the table even though she hated to cook. She was “simultaneously proud of these two different facts that seemed to contradict each other.”

May Lee-Vang

The anthology also includes Hmong American writers, members of the Twin Cities most populous Asian American group. Writer May Lee-Vang reports that she somehow failed to absorb Hmong folk traditions. As a teen, she disliked having to attend various traditional ceremonies, although she loved the special food. She describes arriving at adulthood, suspecting she is ignorant of cultural knowledge that may be important to know. She knows what dishes go with what ceremony but admits to not knowing exactly what the ceremonies are about.

At the end of the story, at around age 40, Lee-Vang finds herself at such a ceremony for her dad after his death, surrounded by food, wondering if her dad has successfully crossed over, as the ceremony has promised.  There are no elders to ask, with parents and grandparents dead, others absent. She remarks to her husband that there are no old people present. “We are the old people,” he tells her.

Shin observed about this and other stories, that there is a phenomenon of immigrant elders dying young, many before their adult children have a chance to benefit from their memories and accumulated knowledge. Dislocation, trauma, hard work and poverty often take their toll on the immigrant generation, she said.

Kou B. Thao

Kou B. Thao, described in his bio as a Hmong healer, writes how hot short-grain rice doused with cold water, a children’s dish in his culture, is still soul food to him. In a very vulnerable essay, he describes a turbulent youth during which he and his siblings experienced food deprivation, followed by too much staying at home alone, and too many junk food meals, while his parents worked at numerous jobs. His weight grew as he approached puberty; he also realized he was gay.

His father’s stories of a painful past during wartime were “weapons of guilt” for Thao and his siblings as children. Only when older did the writer understand that “my parents were the ones assaulted by guilt, stemming from not being able to provide food for my siblings during those difficult times.” Thao writes that his relationship with food was healed in Thailand, while working for a non-profit Hmong youth outreach organization. Food was special, it built community, brought joy, reinforced to him the radical hospitality of his culture, and “I finally learned what it meant to be Hmong.”

Shin thrives on variety; her latest book, The Wet Hex, was recently published. She is also co-authoring a children’s book with Diane Wilson and two other authors, Where We Come From, about forced migration, enslavement, and other historic human rights topics.  Currently she teaches an Asian American film class at the University of Minnesota, and next year will be a visiting distinguished professor at Carleton College in Northfield.

Shin admits to being addicted to anthologies. “I am always delighted, astonished, humbled and intensely interested in writers’ stories,” she said. “And even if you know somebody really well, you don’t get to ever just listen to someone one hour straight. That’s the great thing about a personal essay. They unspool their story, and you can just listen.”  

A warming dish for the adventurous

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Soondae wins on flavor, texture and creativity in Korean cuisine | Food Column by Mary Lee Vance (Fall 2021 issue)

I am usually in the camp of vegetarians and vegans in my food preferences.  I am however, also in the foodie camp, ready all the time for an adventure in any kind of ethnic cuisine. So I do occasionally cross over to the carnivorous world for the sake of a food experience.

That’s the case with my journey into the world of organ and collagen preparations. The whole collagen thing – collagen being gelled bone broth or blood with other ingredients – is a type of cuisine employed used the world over. It  used to be a lot more popular in western culture than it is today, just because food styles change over the years.  

I remember how it was pretty standard to have some sort of gelatin dessert when was a child in southern Wisconsin. Sometimes it was a basic Jell-O made from artificial flavors and eye-popping artificial colors.  Other times, concoctions with a gelatin base were made into a fancy salad – nothing that we would call salad these days, but the term was more encompassing back then. These “salads” would be a wobbly molded shape with ingredients like cream cheese, Cool Whip, fruits (canned, fresh, frozen or dried), marshmallows and nuts; or in savory style with canned or smoked tunafish or other fish or chicken. I feel like all moms kept their fancy molds, shaped like fish, wreaths, hearts, or round shapes, hanging up on the kitchen wall.

In a (perhaps misguided) spirit of “waste not, want not,” there were also some super horrid combinations of Jell-O, calling for chopped hotdogs, sausages, leftover turkey (and stuffing), fish, canned vegetables, pickles and – believe it or not – items like canned soups and SpaghettiO’s. So rather than throwing all ingredients together into a baked casserole/hot dish, the frugal cook could instead glue all the leftovers together with gelatin.

Indeed, some food trends are best left in the past.

I never had to eat any of these yuckier versions, but we did occasionally have head cheese, which despite its name contains no cheese. It consists of chopped organ meats, often from the head of a cow or pig, and set into aspic, a fancier version of prepared collagen (gelatin). This type of dish to use up small bits of meat by suspending in gelled bone broth is a very ancient recipe, perhaps the original Jell-O, which actually is meat, not fruit.

I actually rather liked head cheese. It had the same slippery quality as cold hot dogs.  I liked the semi-soft, cooked meat texture in meat-flavored gelatin. The fact I was eating meat from an animal head, along with other unmentionable organs, did not bother me.

I was the weird kid in the family who enjoyed fried liver with onions as well as liver sausage sandwiches. Later, as a poor college student, I often bought a pint or more of chicken livers to sauté and curry, and have over rice. Whenever offered, I have enjoyed chitlins (this is chopped  large intestine) with collard greens, and the Mexican hangover soup menudo, which is made with tripe (cow’s stomach), and several other organ dishes.

I once also tried haggis while in Scotland, a dish made with various chopped organ meats stuffed into a sheep’s stomach. I also just as eagerly tried English black pudding (aka blood sausage) while I was in Europe. The Korean sausage, soondae or sundae (pronounced “soon-day,” and not the ice cream dessert we know in the U.S.) is very similar to black pudding, only better.  Traditionally made with pork or beef blood, soondae is a creation that demonstrates how hungry people are the most creative people.  Glutinous rice and cellophane noodles give it texture, and kimchi, soybean paste, perilla, and other ingredients, depending on the region, give it a lively taste.  

The best soondae I ever ate was while in South Korea several years ago. I can remember everything except where the place was located. It was a freezing wet day in March, and I was feeling miserably cold. Somehow, my travel companion and I found ourselves in a small butcher shop that had two little tables inside. Initially we thought we would just order a hot drink, but then I saw they served soondae, and it clicked in me that this could be a unique Korean food experience.

The entrée came in a steaming hot bowl with a side of rice and a couple side dishes. As I dipped into the bowl of bubbling soondae guk (soondae in a stew), I realized it was the most flavorful, rich, and delicious soondae I had ever tasted. It was also hot and comforting. After eating it, I felt warmed and energized, ready to face the cold, windy streets again.

Soondae, with its texture derived from sweet rice and sweet potato noodles, also has a spice combination that gives it a unique flavor unlike any American breakfast sausage. It is lighter and fluffier than any other sausage I have had, with a melt-in-your-mouth texture.  

It can be served by itself, like an appetizer, or used as an ingredient in other dishes. While soondae has a slight mineral taste, other ingredients that help balance the flavors. In general, it has a mildly sweet flavor without the overwhelming sage and other heavy spices of American breakfast sausages. Given a choice of U.S.-made breakfast sausages or soondae, I would prefer soondae with my eggs and potatoes.

I have never made my own soondae, but I have experimented with prepared kind, adding it to a stir fry, or simply heating it and serving with hot rice, or eating it by itself as a quick snack. Since it is precooked, it doesn’t really need much preparation.

When eating soondae by itself, Koreans like a variety of dipping sauces.  In restaurants, I have gotten a fancy salt and pepper combination along with it.  I have also been served a dipping sauce of crushed pepper, chopped garlic, a touch of sugar and other spices. This provides a nice complementary taste. For an even simpler sauce, a mixture of Korean gochujang (hot pepper paste), or the pepper sauce of your choice (something like Sriracha) with rice vinegar works well.

Making soondae is a little complex, and requires a sausage stuffing device, but there are many YouTube videos demonstrating how to make it. Below is one recipe that provided the most specific directions and seemed the easiest.

Special soondae-making equipment includes a mortar and pestle, cotton string, and a funnel or sausage-stuffing machine.  For casing, this recipe requires about three feet of beef or pork intestine or other sausage casing. 

Basic Soondae

Ingredients:
Two C. sweet rice
One half of a 12-ounce package of sweet potato starch vermicelli
About 4 garlic cloves
A one-inch knob fresh ginger, grated
1 t. salt
1/2 t. pepper
One T.  Korean toasted sesame oil
About one  t. sesame seeds, dry toasted
About two scallions, finely chopped
About two C. beef or pork blood

Method:
Soak rice for about 30 minutes. Rinse with cold water until water runs clear. Place rice in rice cooker with 1/4 cup less water than standard cooking instructions call for, OR on the stovetop, place rice in or pot with 3 1/2 cups water. Bring to a boil, then immediately reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer for about 45 minutes. Remove from heat, fluff with fork, and let cool.

Clean the intestine by running slightly warm water through one end and squeezing gently through to the other. Rinse in cold water, then soak in a light saltwater solution (one teaspoon salt per quart of water) for about an hour. Cut into one-foot sections or leave whole as desired. Tie one end of each section closed with cotton string.

To prepare the stuffing, soak noodles in lukewarm water until soft, then rough chop and place in a large mixing bowl Add finely chopped scallion. Crush and grind together sesame seeds, garlic and ginger with mortar and pestle, and add to bowl. Mix in rice and blood, and stir until combined thoroughly.

Using a funnel or sausage stuffing machine, loosely stuff each section. Gently squeeze stuffing through the entire length of the section, taking care not to pack the sausage too tightly or it may split during cooking. Tie off open ends with cotton string.

Place sausage into a pot and completely cover with a saltwater solution (one teaspoon salt per quart of water). Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer uncovered for about 45 minutes. Sausage is done when a toothpick or skewer is inserted and comes out clean.

Cooked sausage imay be served immediately (sliced on a diagonal about 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick), or frozen for later use in other dishes. Before serving, cut off and discard the string tied ends.  Serve warm with a small dish of mixed salt and pepper, and one of gochujang. Soondae may also be served ssam (wrapped) style with large leaves (tender cabbage, large looseleaf lettuce, or perilla) ssamjang dipping sauce, and rice.

One essential adult skill

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Cultivating the fine art of hangover soups | Food Column by Mary Lee Vance (Summer 2021 issue)

Haejangguk (literally hangover soup)

In my entire life, I have only drunk alcohol to excess once. It happened when I was at an all-you-can-drink wine fundraising event while I was in college shortly after I turned 18 (the legal drinking age at that time in my state). I was among friends and knew I would be safe to get drunk. They thought the idea was hilarious and promised to take me home.

After about three glasses of wine, I felt the earth spinning, my tongue getting numb, and my body feeling lethargic like I was swimming in molasses. I then felt an overwhelming thirst and chugged a couple glasses of water until my head cleared.

That was it. I failed to get drunk. I was apparently unable to drink to the point where I did the kind of disgusting things drunk people reportedly do, which I won’t discuss here, but that apparently involve bodily fluids and severe headaches.

As an adult, I discovered my body repeats the same pattern when I drink alcohol. It automatically shuts off any interest in the stuff after a couple drinks. Without fail, I get super thirsty, have to drink lots of water or soft drinks, which gradually quells any alcohol buzz in the making. While my tolerance for alcohol is not very high, my interest in hot and spicy food has always been constant. And food is my party ingredient of choice.

As a foodie, I always looked for the menu items that would help me identify a restaurant as ethnically and culturally authentic. Being charged for an ordinary side dish of kimchi in a Korean restaurant instantly makes me skeptical about who the owners and cooks are. This only happened to me once in Chicago. I was righteously outraged that the menu included a charge for kimchi. When I called the owner over to ask why the charge, she told me it was because too many people wasted it when it was a free item, so they charged in order to reduce waste. Then she asked if I was Korean. When I said yes, the owner offered me some on the house.  I’m glad I didn’t pay for it, because it was the oldest, sourest kimchi I have ever eaten in a restaurant, fit only to be an ingredient in kimchi stew (chigae), where a little goes a long way.

Near one of my past homes, there was a small Korean restaurant that made the best kimchi chigae I ever had, with added jalapenos and other spicy peppers. Whenever I felt a cold coming, I would immediately go to that restaurant for a bowl of hot and spicy goodness, feeling its healing powers almost immediately. As the sweat poured off me, I could imagine the cold virus melting away along with all the other bad germs.

Where I lived, there were several small, non-descript Mexican restaurants, which made sense given the high number of farms in the state that attracted migrant farm workers. As a foodie, I had to check the restaurants, and in the process developed a fondness for menudo, not knowing that it was considered a soup for the morning after a night of alcoholic excess. It has the same effect as kimchi chigae in its light and spicy goodness and head-clearing medicinal properties. It is rich in flavor, and extra delicious with freshly-squeezed lime, chopped cilantro, and sliced radish added to the top for textural and flavor contrast. After noting the effects of my first bowl, I could appreciate why some would consider it a miracle cure. For me, it just filled my tummy with happiness.

At one restaurant, I noticed menudo written on a sandwich board on a Saturday but not later in the week. What happened to it?  Apparently only authentic Mexican restaurants with a solid Mexican clientele seemed to have it.  It wasn’t until years later that I learned why it was only served primarily on the weekends – it was due to its curative properties for hangovers that put it on the special menu on Saturdays and Sundays.  

Every culture has its magical hangover remedy. It might take the shape of a beverage or a stew, and invariably includes spicy peppers in one shape or another. There is a factual basis to these somewhat spiritual beliefs about “cures” for hangovers. Peppers, especially hot peppers, are loaded with vitamin C.  Peppers, orange juice and other vitamin C superfoods are often recommended as hangover cures. However, there is little scientific proof that vitamin C (or its alcoholic relative, the mimosa) has any beneficial effect on hangovers. The magic hangover ingredient, if there is one, is in the hot peppers, specifically the chemical capsaicin, which provides the peppery taste, the feel-good endorphins, and the sweating reaction. No wonder I love hot and spicy foods!

The sweating process is what releases the nasty hangover toxins, as does plenty of hydration, as I learned early in my drinking non-career. Drinking lots of fluids, water in particular, flushes out the bad effect of alcohol. If there is any magic to banishing the effects of a night of indulgence, it’s the hot peppers that calm the aftereffects of drinking, or in my case, that can ward off the nastier effects of a pending cold. The nutrients, water, and steam for the sinuses are other added benefits.

For some people, the “hair of the dog” is needed to cure a hangover. For a morning-after headache, some believe more alcohol the next day is the thing. I remember from growing up in Wisconsin where there literally was a bar on every corner, that many opened at 7 a.m., Bloody Marys are quite popular, not only in Wisconsin, but in most of the Midwest. In addition to vodka and tomato juice a key ingredient for a Bloody Mary is hot sauce, so the combination of a shot of alcohol and a dose of hot pepper certainly has some of the same hangover soup science behind it.  

A fancier interpretation of the “hair of the dog” theory is the mimosa, a lower alcohol combo of champagne and orange juice. Mimosas are the brunch drink of choice in many states where oranges are plentiful, including California and Florida. Hot peppers are not an ingredient, but the vitamin C and hydration may provide some curative effect.

Foodie note:  Rather than a mimosa, I would rather drink freshly squeezed limes, with a bit of brown sugar, some chopped garlic, a touch of soy sauce and smashed red peppers (to taste), with alcohol optional. The lime drink is actually based on the dressing used for Thai green papaya salad but once while making the salad, I found myself making a quadruple batch of the dressing, because I was guzzling it straight – so good!

However, rather than cocktails, I think soups are a better way to combat hangovers by providing fluids, something nutritious in the stomach and a method of super-flushing toxins. Common ingredients for all hangover soups include some form of protein, garlic and black pepper, and a capsaicin-rich form of chili pepper.  Menudo and kimchi chigae, two such medicinal soups, use spicy red pepper as the primary toxin remover.

Another Korean hangover-fighting soup would be army stew (budaechigae) which traditionally features a variable and seemingly wacky combination of proteins including hot dogs and/or Vienna sausages and/or Spam, some kimchi and other peppery ingredients.  The recipe was thought up as a way to use Army rations that were plentiful after the Korean War.

A Polish hangover soup recipe I saw includes horseradish, black pepper, and garlic. Chinese hangover soup (congee) uses chicken, fresh ginger, garlic and scallions. Czech soup calls for lots of garlic.

Below is a basic Korean hangover soup recipe, if kimchi chigae or army stew, doesn’t quite work for you. While most hangover soups call for meat broth and meat, these soups can be made vegetarian or vegan and still be equally effective. Many Korean hangover soups are quite complicated (which I cannot picture a truly hungover person trying to make), but the following is pretty basic and easily converted to please vegetarians or carnivores.

Haejangguk (literally hangover soup, serves four to six)

Ingredients:
2 heads baby napa cabbage (about a pound each)
3 T. doenjang (Korean fermented soybean paste)
2 T. gochugaru (Korean ground hot pepper powder)
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 T. soy sauce
1 T. Korean-style toasted sesame oil
3/4 cup of bean sprouts
1/2 cup of sliced zucchini
1 scallion, thinly sliced
1 Korean red chili pepper, thinly sliced
1 Anaheim chili pepper, thinly sliced
5 cups of vegetable stock (Substitute store-bought bouillon if too lazy to make)

Method:
1. Fill a large pot with water and bring to a boil over high heat. Fill a large bowl with ice water and set it nearby. Blanch both whole cabbages for one minute, drain, then drop them into ice water to stop the cooking. When cool, drain and cut into 2-inch pieces.


2. In a large bowl, combine doenjang, gochugaru, garlic, soy sauce and sesame oil. Add blanched cabbage, bean sprouts, zucchini, scallion and chili peppers, and mix well. Marinate at room temperature for 15 minutes.


3. Transfer the contents of the mixing bowl back to the emptied blanching pot and add stock. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium for 10 minutes, and serve.

Fusion on wheels

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Korean food met Mexican food, and they got married on the road | Food column by Mary Lee Vance (Spring 2021 issue)

The “Kimchi Taco” food truck.

I admit it.  I have a weakness for food trucks, street food, and special food at any venue. If there is food at an event, I’m interested. If the food is ethnic and made for the palates of specific ethnic populations not normally available in a restaurant, I get super interested.

Not surprisingly, I am a bit chunky. However, it is an occupational hazard (she said with confidence).  I consider skinny people who claim the foodie title to be suspicious at best.  If they really enjoy what they are cooking and sampling, wouldn’t they have a bit more weight on them?

The reason I love food trucks is they are the creative roots of food fusion you would never see in a normal-size ethnic restaurant. The small size of the kitchen and storage on a food truck is a source of great problem solving.  Food truck menus are very limited, which works well when trying to quickly serve long lines of hungry customers. Each truck has had to specialize in what it can make well and focus its marketing on some very specific items.  This all requires wise use of resources and a big dash of imagination.

I’m always open to the daily specials on food trucks, often the experimental dish they are trying to launch. There are those (non-foodies I would guess), who would warn against eating specials. To them, the specials represent what the chef/cook is trying to get rid of before it goes bad. I find nothing wrong with this concept, as I do the same thing. If I see that something in my fridge is nearing the expiration date, I try to make something with it immediately before I have to trash it. Since I hate to waste food, this often ends up as a brand new combination with other items I have on hand.  This is what any frugal cook would do.

“Oh My Gogi” food truck based in Houston.

Another thing about food trucks – a good percentage these days specialize in ethnic cuisine. Any establishment specializing in food of an ethnic community is a draw for me. People who know and love their food will work to make it taste great.

The worst experiences were when I had to travel for work, back in the early 1980s, and asked for vegetarian meals.  I remember being served boring and flavorless pasta dishes meal after meal. It shocked me that the chefs of high-end hotel chains didn’t know how to prepare flavorful vegetarian dishes that were commonly available in other countries. The menu item was available because they were told to produce it, not because they knew and loved the flavors of good vegetarian food.

There’s also an element of caution among western chefs, I believe, to avoid dishes that are too “ethnic” for fear of scaring off their western clientele.

During this time of frequent travel, I remember getting handed English language menus, particularly in Chinese restaurants, with a short list of the most common go-to dishes. I soon learned if I wanted something more authentic, I would have to request the Chinese menu. One Chinese restaurant, I learned, was owned by a South Korean. The restaurant not only had an English menu with Americanized dishes, but also had a Chinese menu with Chinese dishes.

However, once I learned the owner and chef were Korean, I would simply ask for Korean dishes (there was no menu for those). After I got to know the couple, I would stop by the restaurant, have some lunch, and ask them to help me plan a dinner party at their place.  I would inform them, for example, that I had 10 people in the party, that each person would pay “x” amount, so the budget for the meal would be “x times 10.” I then would ask the owner/chef to provide a few specific dishes that I knew everyone would like, and ask them to surprise me with one other dish they wanted to make, while insuring they still had enough to cover server tips.

They never disappointed me, and my dinner guests were always thrilled. It soon became a status thing to be invited by me, to join one of my ethnic dining-out experiences. Were any of those dishes made with items nearing expiration dates? Most likely yes, but they were always undeniably delicious.

Except for big venues like the state fair or another big community event, ethnic food trucks were a rare site in the Midwest until recent years.  The uncooperative weather (think Minnesota and Wisconsin) most likely had something to do with this, as the trucks only appear in the summer and an (Upper) Midwestern summer only lasts around three months, from June through August. For the most part, the trucks I remember depended on old favorites like lemonade, funnel cakes, corn dogs, cream puffs, giant pretzels, burgers, fries, and pizza.

Nowadays, taco trucks are pretty common in large Midwestern cities, but back in the day, I never saw one except in other states.

I’m betting there are plenty of Korean food lovers besides me who have put kimchi on their hotdogs and burgers, mixed kochujang (hot pepper paste) into our pasta sauces and stews (or even used it instead of ketchup). We’ve all probably eaten leftover bulgogi with hamburger buns or whatever starch we had in the house.

Not surprisingly, in the late 1990s, clever taco truck chefs began capitalizing on the growing popularity of Korean food by popping a few Korean ingredients into in their menu items. Bulgogi is very similar to a roasted barbecue meat preparation called al pastor, a common taco filling. The similarities of the cultural palates of Koreans and Mexicans does not end with the meat. Mexicans love the tangy flavor of freshly squeezed lime, pickled jalapenos, and hot peppers combined with shredded lettuce on their tacos. The spice-pickle-crunch combination provided by kimchi delivers a very similar flavor profile and kick to the taste buds. It was the creativity of taco truck chefs that started the marriage of these two food cultures that is now growing internationally.  

Mexican Korean food fusion is very popular in South Korea as well as in the Los Angeles area, where this fusion style was reportedly born.  One example is a Seoul restaurant called Vatos Urban Tacos (founded by three Korean Americans, in the Itaewon neighborhood and other places in Seoul, with a branch also in Singapore) which combines the best of both Korean and Mexican worlds. Their kimchi quesadilla is one of several popular dishes. Their other well-known dish is kimchi fries, with chopped kimchi covering carnitas-loaded fries.

Here are two favorite Korean Mex dishes that may hit the spot: 

Chilaquiles with Gochujang

Ingredients:
1 dried ancho chile
2 C. water
1 C. crushed tomatoes
2 cloves of garlic
1 t. kosher salt
1 1/2 T. gochujang
5 to 6 cups tortilla chips
3 large eggs
1 T. olive oil

Optional Toppings:
crumbled cotija (a fresh Mexican cheese)
chopped cilantro
sliced jalapeño peppers
diced onions
sliced avocado

Method:
1. Bring the water to boil in a saucepan. Add the ancho chile to the boiled water and soak to give it time to rehydrate. After 15 minutes, remove the chile, and save the water for the sauce.
2. Blend the soaked chile, 1 cup of reserved hot water, crushed tomatoes, garlic, salt, and gochujang until smooth.
3. Pour sauce into a large pan and heat over medium heat four to five minutes. Turn off the heat and add the tortilla chips.  Stir to coat with the sauce.
4. In a separate pan, drizzle a teaspoon of oil and fry an egg until the whites have settled.  Fry each egg separately, keeping the fried ones on a warm covered plate.
5. Top chips with fried eggs, cotija, chopped cilantro, jalapeños, onions, and avocado. Serve immediately.

Korean Style Mexican Elotes (vegan)

Ingredients:
2 ears of fresh corn
1/2 avocado (sliced)
2 T. red onion (finely chopped)
1 T. green onion (chopped)
1/2 C. kimchi
2 T. dairy-free sour cream
2 T. gochujang (mix with sugar and soy sauce/water to make thin enough for squirting)
1 T. fresh lime juice
1/4 C. dairy-free cheddar cheese
Salt and pepper 

Directions:
1. Cook corn as you would normally (I steam it) and place on your serving platter.
2. Load your cobs up with kimchi and then sliced avocado.
3. Fill a squeeze bottle (or a Ziploc bag with the corner cut off) with vegan sour cream to drizzle on top of the corn. Do the same with gochujang mix.
4. Top your sauce-lathered corn with sliced onions, cheese, salt and pepper and a squeeze of lime juice. Enjoy hot or cold.

The challenge of fish cakes

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During the cooler months, defy the naysayers, and perfect a warming seafood soup | Food column by Mary Lee Vance (Winter 2021 issue)

When Eric and I were living in Iowa, we went to Des Moines to a Jewish deli that was recommended to us as authentic. On the menu at the counter was a “Red Sea Platter” that included gefilte fish.  I was curious about gefilte fish but had never tried it, so I ordered their Red Sea Platter.

The man behind the counter was big, maybe six feet tall (OK, everyone is tall compared to me), with a portly build and hairy arms. When I ordered, he crossed his arms, looked at me and scowled. “You won’t like it,” he said. I was stunned, because I had never had anyone tell me I wouldn’t like a menu item I ordered. Then he added “I won’t sell it you.”

Well, that was a mistake. Word to the wise, directed at opinionated restaurant servers — that person whose tastes you are predicting may be a foodie like me who has to personally try everything. Being told what we like just gives us more attitude. Irritated, I told him that I wouldn’t know if I liked it until I tried it. Then Eric, ever loyal to me, told the man that I eat anything, and that he should let me have the platter. The server just stood there. 

At this point I started having thoughts that perhaps I was making the man prepare something complicated.  What if I imposed on him to make something complex, and then discovered I didn’t like gefilte fish after all? “Is it difficult to prepare?” I asked, genuinely getting worried.

“Nah,” he responded, “I just have to stick my fingers in the jar and pull out a patty.” As he said that, I looked from his hairy arms to his hairy fingers and shuddered.  But I told him I still wanted the platter and that I would not be dissuaded. Shrugging, he wrote down the order and we went to find a table.

A few minutes later, we were served with a homemade bagel, a mound of red horseradish, and a fresh-out-of-the-jar gefilte fish patty. I spread horseradish on the bagel and placed the gefilte fish on top, all under the watchful eyes of the man who had not left our table. As I started to take a bite, he gave me a look that seemed to challenge me not to like the fish.

I bit into the room-temperature slice of gelatinous fish and found the flavor bland and the texture soft and a bit jiggly. The strong flavor of the homemade horseradish and the chewiness of the fresh-baked bagel provided a much-needed flavor and texture contrast. “Well?” he asked, starting to tap one foot. I looked at him, shrugged, and said “Tastes like fish spam – not bad, but not too exciting. However, the horseradish and the bagel are excellent.” He then spun on his heels and left us alone to finish the meal.

A few months later, we went back, and I ordered the Red Sea Platter again. The same man was there, giving me the same declarations. I snapped at him ‘Look, we have been through this before — just sell it to me.” He sold it to me without another word.

Gefilte fish in a jar is similar to Asian-style fish balls, which I find in the freezer section of local Asian grocery stores. Both are chopped-up fish preparations, with some kind of binder and a few other ingredients. Homemade gefilte fish generally contains chopped vegetables and eggs to create a fluffier texture, while Asian-style fish balls are smaller and heavier. Nearly every culture has its own version of a fish ball or fish cake. It’s a frugal preparation, allowing better mixing, seasoning and extending of valuable seafood proteins.

When I was in Korea last time, it was March, and still bitterly cold. The wind bit at my ungloved hands when I was traveling the streets of Seoul. Fortunately, there were small shops on nearly every block for shelter and coffee. There were also fish cake soup vendors, with their boiling broth, releasing clouds of steam into the cold air, doing a brisk business. A styrofoam cup of hot goodness cost about 2000 won, about two dollars. One serving contained wonderful broth and several sheets of fish cake, threaded onto skewers. I ate the soup by eating the warm fish cakes first, then drinking the hot broth to get the full effect of the heating and healing qualities of the soup.

In most Korean or Asian grocery stores in the U.S., inexpensive fish cake is available in the freezer section. In Korean restaurants, fish cake often shows up as one of the banchan (side dishes served with an entrée). To make a soup with fish cakes, the easiest method is to add the sliced sheets to a broth made from kelp, soy sauce, rice wine, chopped garlic, salt and pepper with chopped green onions for garnish.

However, because not everyone can buy fish cake sheets, here is a homemade fish cake recipe to try from the website of my favorite online Korean chef, Maangchi, which allows the cook to adjust seasonings for the perfect homemade taste. It sounds like a lot of ingredients, but with a food processor, the whole thing comes together at the push of a button. After that is a typical broth recipe that will give you a good representation of a Seoul street vendor’s final product:   

Korean Fish Cakes  

Ingredients:
½ lb. fresh white fresh fish fillet (cod, pollock, flounder, or snapper)
¼ lb. (4 ounces) squid, cleaned, rinsed, and chopped
¼ lb. (4 ounces) shrimp, shelled, deveined, rinsed, and drained
2 garlic cloves
½ medium onion (about ¼ C)
1 t. kosher salt
1 t. sugar
¼ t. ground white pepper
3 C plus 1 T. vegetable oil
¼ C all-purpose flour
¼ C potato starch (or sweet potato starch)
1 large egg white

Method:
1. Inspect fish fillet and remove any remaining bones. Cut the fish fillets into chunks and drop into a food processor. Add the squid, shrimp, garlic, onion, kosher salt, sugar, ground white pepper, 1 tablespoon vegetable oil, flour, starch, and egg white. Blend for a couple of minutes until the mixture turns into a smooth paste.

2. Transfer to a bowl.

3. Heat 3 cups vegetable oil in a skillet over medium high heat for about 5 minutes. Lower the heat to medium (about 330-350° F or 180° C)

4. Brush some cooking oil on a wide rectangular spatula. Spread about ¼ to ⅓ cup of the fish paste to the spatula with a knife. Use knife to carefully roll the paste into a cylinder, and gently slide it into the hot oil.
(If this method is too tricky, simply use a spoon to scoop up the paste, and then another one to push it off into the hot oil.)

5. Repeat shaping and pushing the fish mixture into hot oil, three to four at a time, being careful not to crowd them. Stir the fish cakes occasionally to fry all sides evenly. Let them cook about five to seven minutes over medium heat until golden brown. Strain the cooked fish cakes over a small bowl, patting with paper towels to remove excess oil.

6. Freshly-cooked fish cakes are perfect as a snack right away. For later use, cool down and store in plastic, in the fridge for up to a week or freezer up to three months.

Korean Fish Cake Soup Broth (serves two)

Soup ingredients:
4 rectangle fish cake sheets or two servings homemade fish cakes 
3-4 green onions, thinly sliced
1 T. soy sauce 
1 T. rice wine 
1 t. minced garlic
A few cracks of ground black pepper
Fine sea salt to taste (optional)

Broth ingredients:
6 C water
0.4 ounces dried kelp
1 ounce dried anchovy (optional)
3.5 ounces white radish/Korean radish/daikon radish, thinly sliced

Broth method:
1. Put 6 C water in a medium/large pot and add the dried kelp and anchovies. Boil for 10 minutes uncovered on medium heat.
2. Remove and discard kelp and add the radish slices. Boil the radish and anchovy for 10 more minutes.  At the same time, run some hot water onto the fish cake sheets to remove any excess oil coating (store-bought fish cakes are deep fried).
3. Remove and set aside the radish. Sieve stock through cheese cloth or linen to remove small particles of kelp and anchovies. (If you don’t mind these particles, just skip this step, but I recommend sieving!)
4. Slice the fish cakes into small rectangles, or in long strips and thread through wooden skewers for a fancier look. Garnish with more green onions and black pepper on top.

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