Trying First Korean Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
In the year 2000, I began working as a restaurant critic for
the Monterey
County Weekly newspaper (Circulation: 200,000), which serves an area that
is the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined. (I have always been able to drive Big Sur.)
One of the reasons I was hired was that I have an excellent
knowledge of foreign cuisines and cultures, lived overseas as an exchange
student with the Youth for Understanding program, and graduated from the
University of Chicago with a degree in East Asian Studies and an undeclared
minor in art history.
My husband Laurent and I both wanted our daughter Florence
to know about world cultures, so we took her along on restaurant reviews. I had a meal stipend from the newspaper for
two diners, but paid extra for Florence to come along.
Florence had excellent manners (i.e. she did not climb
around seats and tables, throw things, or talk loudly). She was actually pretty good cover for
restaurant critics going to moderately priced restaurants.
The first place I reviewed for the Monterey County Weekly was
the Orient Express in Seaside, California.
I went to the library and looked up Korean recipes, so I would know more
about the spices, seasonings, and techniques used in the foods. I cited the cookbooks I used in the
restaurant reviews, if people wanted recipes or cultural information.
The following is the article that was published in the Monterey
County Weekly. The Weekly
editors chose the headlines for my articles, which I have left intact:
Seoul Food
For twelve years I have been practicing what Raymond Sokolov
calls gastro-ethnography learning about a country’s culture by studying its
food, meal rituals, and history of the cuisine’s dishes. I read some Korean cookbooks, made a list of
questions, and set out to do some tasty fieldwork at the Orient Express
Restaurant in Seaside, California.
I took a Korea travel guide to get a conversation going with
our server. Our server, who was dressed
in a white-collared shirt and black slacks covered by a blue apron, asked if I
was (sic) going to Korea.
I told her “not yet” and that I wanted to learn about Korean
food. She beamed a wide smile at me. She said she would love to talk about Korea.
For lunch she recommended three typical dishes to us:
bulgogi (grilled strips of marinated beef), jap chae (noodles with beef and
vegetables), and dak man doo kuk (Korean New Year’s soup with beef and rice
cakes).
We ordered tea and beer.
When I asked if there were Korean beers, our waitress smiled at me.
“Do women in Korea drink beer?” I asked.
She said they had just recently started to and disappeared
into the kitchen.
She reappeared with a metal teapot that she held in her
right hand. She put her left hand under
her right forearm saying, “This is how we serve tea.”
She served my husband Laurent first and said, “We always
serve others before ourselves.”
She looked at Florence and said, “We never serve children
like this,” as she poured Florence’s tea with her right hand only.
The tea smelled and tasted like corn on the cob, because
Koreans use ground-roasted barley and corn to make their tea. I wondered when and how New World food
products like corn and chilis arrived in Korea.
The advertising slogan on the Hite beer cracked me up: Beer
Rich with the Spirit of Pure Spring Water in Green Mountains. Canada must share these same qualities,
because the Hite tastes like Molson and Moosehead.
I easily understood why the Koreans eat duk man doo kuk soup
as a New Year’s treat with its three-inch pork and scallion-filled wonton
noodles, strips of beef, thin sheets of scrambled egg, and oval-shaped rice
cakes floating in a chicken broth seasoned with scallions and garlic.
The bulgogi beef strips arrived sizzling with onions. Florence claimed the bulgogi as her own. The jap chae had strips of grilled beef in
it, too, buried among the translucent noodles colored brown by the sesame oil
used to fry shredded carrots and onions.
The Korean use of beef is unique in East Asia where Japanese
cuisine revolves around ocean fish and that of China around pork, fresh-water
fish, ocean-water fish, and chicken.
Koreans are partly descended from beef-loving Mongol invaders. The pasturelands of Korea’s Cheju Island,
south of the mountainous peninsula allow Koreans to regularly eat beef.
Our server told us that cooks marinate beef in soy sauce,
water, sugar, garlic, sesame oil, and a little pepper before grilling it.
Our server brought out twelve vegetable side dishes, pan
ch’an. These included white, rectangular
pieces of tasteless mung bean jello, bean sprouts, raw garlic cloves in soy
sauce, potatoes in soy sauce with sesame oil, crunchy broccoli stems, seaweed,
and spinach.
(Note: pan ch’an changes with the season and what is
available on the market.)
There were three kinds of chili-coated kimchi (radish,
cucumber, and cabbage).
I could easily make a meal of cabbage kimchi and rice like
many poor Koreans have done. (I was not
being facetious when I wrote this despite what one book reviewer said when I
put this article in my book The Edible Tao. I have had to be a vegetarian for financial reasons several times
in my life and knew about protein combinations and vitamins that chase away
colds. Kimchi is the vegetarian elixir
of life, if you can stand the garlic.)
From a gastronomic point of view, I love kimchi for its
juicy, salty taste of the cabbage followed by a chili and raw garlic heat
wallop that makes my nose run. Eating
rice cools off the tongue.
Some Korean restaurants give you gum when you leave to kill
the smell of raw garlic on your breath from the kimchi. I thanked our server and said I would be back
to do more research.
End of Article
I took Florence back to Orient Express after school many
times and to other Korean restaurants in our neighborhood throughout Florence’s
youth, but the main spot we would go was Orient Express.
The owner of one of the restaurants even lent me bilingual
Korean-English folktale books for children, so I could read them to Florence
and teach her about Korean culture.
I am glad that my restaurant reviews encourage many people
to try “strip mall restaurants.” They
soon found out that many of these strip mall restaurants have a lot of free
parking and modern plumbing in the bathrooms and kitchens.
I liked our vacation in the US restaurant outings. I also love all the Korean cookbooks that are
coming out on Amazon Kindle now. They
are very reasonably priced. My favorite
Korean cookbook, though, was published by the Ten Speed Press out of San
Francisco, California:
-Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
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