Korean Food: A Crash Course

Today at an impromptu teacher's lunch/dinner (the proceedings stretched continuously from about eleven thirty in the morning until five in the evening) I ate the following, in order.

FIRST SNACK
Kimbap.
Coffee.

SECOND SNACK
Korean lunch-box (including pork cutlet, rice, soup, and a variety of other things whose name I do not know.)
Coffee
Coffee-flavored cookies.

THIRD SNACK (speared by the P.E. teacher as he waded into the ocean in a SCUBA suit--literally killed by the P.E. teacher not more than three minutes prior to the food sliding into our mouths--did I mention that we were eating this all right on the beach?)
Fresh sea cucumber.
Assorted fish.

APPETIZER
Mussel soup.

SECOND APPETIZER
Live! Sea! Cucumber!
Live penis fish. (I do not know what this is in English, but it looks like a penis, and it's most certainly an invertebrate, because even after you kill it and chop it up it continues to writhe in agony suggesting it has no central nervous system. It looks pretty much exactly like a penis.)
Live octopus.
Some sort of crustacean that tastes like sea water that we certainly do not eat in America.

MAIN DISH
Fresh scallops (still moving) cooked on a table-mounted barbecue. (The first cooked thing we ate all day!)
Some other sort of fresh shell-fish.
Kim-chee.

AFTER-MAIN DISH SNACK
Eel. (Now, there were many things I ate which the Korean teachers suggested would give me 'stamina', basically all the phallic fish which you ate still alive fall into this category, for obvious reason, but the very most potent stamina-boosting food was the spine of the eel, served separately from the rest of the eel, and I ate about ten of them, these spines, and though you might think that the whole stamina thing is bullshit, I'm having heart palpitations right now, and I blame it squarely on my eel-induced male power.

I managed to get home somehow but some of the P.E. teachers want me to come out and drink with them. But I can barely move.

Things Taste Strange, Things Are Strange

Image from Shorpy.

You would easily expect food to be different in Korea. And you're right. You will notice of course the very obvious differences--but those differences you expect, you expect the Koreans to eat live octopus and kim chee But it are those more subtle, less superficial differences in taste that end up shocking you. I have two examples of this. Both of them come from the workplace casual of the staff-room.

A couple hours ago I was offered what the Koreans call a japjari tomato. This is a green tomato that you eat raw and whole, like an apple. Now, we're all used to tomatoes in our sauces and on our salads and on our sandwiches or over our pasta or on our pizza, but I think this was one of the first times when I just had a tomato--just a lone tomato. And the taste was a tart explosion of a vinegary pulp with a ringing bite of brine, with a slight fog of unami hanging as an aftertaste, with a mouthfeel like a squishy apple. Sure, it tasted like a tomato. But here, out of context, even the taste of a tomato can taste utterly foreign, a revelation.

And then I was just chatting to a fellow teacher when she handed me a stub of a microwaved sweet potato. "Here," she said. And I ate it. Just like you'd eat some chips.

Sweet potatoes as a snack? Tomatoes eaten like an apple? Strange food isn't just a matter of mixing strange ingredients, but a matter of thinking about ingredients differently. Indeed, so much of our cooking--like so much of our culture--is simply contingent, arbitrary, and meaningless, the epiphenomena of history, and yet we tie food so tightly around our sense of self, it sometimes still baffles me how meaningful it all seems.

First Meal In Korea!

I'm typing this through a cloud of jetlag and confusion. It's so very strange to be a foreigner, but the strangeness eases me. I feel at home in airports, food courts, empty malls; there I have no responsibility other than to wait, to walk to the right gate, to board the right plane and sit in place, to eat. The ubiquitous novelty of foreignness feels easy. I have no responsibility but to look, to take in, to move.

More later. In the meantime, check out the photos.