Cyd Leela - Everyday Korean: fresh, modern recipes for home cooks

ALSO BY KIM SUNE

Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home

A Mouthful of Stars: A Constellation of Favorite Recipes from My World Travels

ALSO BY LEELA CYD

Food with Friends: The Art of Simple Gatherings

Text Copyright 2017 by Kim Sune and Seung Hee Lee
Photographs Copyright 2017 by Leela Cyd

All rights reserved

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Book design by Nick Caruso Design
Production manager: Devon Zahn
Cover photographs by Leela Cyd
Jacket design by Nick Caruso Design

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978-1-68268-114-5

978-1-68268-115-2 (e-book)

If Japanese food was a romantic comedy, Korean food would be an action movie.

Welcome to the Everyday Korean kitchen. Whether youre a cook just starting out or a well-seasoned chef, we hope that you are as excited about cooking with Korean flavors as we are to share these recipes with you. Creating this book has truly been a labor of love, a collaboration between two food-obsessed enthusiastic cooks. If were not shopping, cooking, and eating, we are planning the next dish, the next meal, the next way to share the table with those we love.

We met in Seoul in 2008; Seung Hee was my interpreter during the book tour for the Korean-language edition of my memoir, Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home. After an emotional journey through Seoul (revisiting orphanages and markets in hopes that I might find some trace of my birth family) and many shared meals, not to mention glasses of bubbles and soju, we bonded over our love of food, Seung Hee acting as the culinary guide, helping me taste my way through my birth country and feel at home.

Seung Hee, who would soon leave to study at Johns Hopkins, also trained at the prestigious Taste of Korea Institute, a research organization dedicated to the preservation of Korean royal court cuisine, Korean culinary traditions, and reviving traditional recipes for modern-day kitchens. Thanks to her, we were allowed access one day during the filming of a KBS documentary filmed by Hongseok Roy Ro.

We steamed rice cakes wrapped in ramie fragrant leaves of the nettle familyand braised short ribs to be served with perfect diamond-shape egg garnishes. I was admonished repeatedly for not perfectly slicing the raw chestnuts and fresh jujube into equal-size julienne pieces. Despite my inadequacies, I was happy in that kitchen. We were a group of women working together to re-create flavors from dishes deeply rooted in tradition and history.

Ive often been asked about taste memory and what it means, especially for a cuisine that I didnt grow up eating; I was in a kitchen thousands of miles away, watching my adoptive grandfather stir huge pots of crawfish bisque and red beans and rice and fry up paned veal to top with lump crabmeat or a deep red gravy. Later, throughout the ten years I lived in France and traveled throughout Europe, Id come to taste and cook freshly unearthed truffles and all manner of foie gras as well as the rustic foods of Provence, including soupe dpautre, garlic-laden pistou, and caramelized onion pissaladire.

As much as I was fascinated by Korean cuisine, I was also intimidated by the idea of actually cooking with techniques and ingredients so different from my culinary background. But Ive always felt deeply connected to the flavors and beauty of this rustic hearty cuisine.

Over the years, weve talked about writing this book together with a focus in re-creating delicious interpretations of Korean dishes with deep flavor and ease of preparation using ingredients familiar to the non-Korean home cook. Many of the recipes are based on traditional Korean recipes, many from Seung Hees family, but with a modern twist using fresh, seasonal ingredients. Others are reinterpretations with new flavors influenced by our respective travels and what we like to cook and eat on a daily basis.

Ive learned so much about the food of my birth country in the process. I hope that this culinary journey will inspire you as well to include traditional Korean flavors in your daily cooking repertoire. And while I have yet to find my birth family, I did find a sister for life and a place at the Korean Table. And for that, I will always be grateful.

As a child, I ate everything from mountain greens to frog legs. My grandmother, who was my caregiver when my mother was at work, never left the kitchen. Naturally, thats where I hung out. She was a culinary wizard and together we foraged dandelion greens to make kimchi, dried acorns on the balcony for acorn jelly, and much more. The kitchen was my playground.

My mother, despite her demanding full-time job as a professor, always put homemade food on the table. That was her mantragood nourishment for a healthy body. As the firstborn daughter, I was my moms best helper. She would call me from work at five p.m. to wash the rice, and remind me again in thirty minutes to press the rice cooker. By the time she got home, the freshly cooked rice was ready for all of us.

My love for food has an adventurous side, thanks to my father who grew up in Busanthe largest port city in Korea. One of the many food stories in our family is of a three-year-old me eating a live octopus on a stick, like a lollipop. My father and I would go out in the ocean for sea urchin, and he would crack them right out of the water and put the lobes of delicious uni in my mouth.

Many years later, when I had to pick a major in college, I went with food and nutrition. If I couldnt go to a culinary school, I thought that was the next best thing. My wise mentor advised me, if I were to study abroad, I needed to know real Korean food beyond Korean BBQ that most foreigners are familiar with. Thats when I started attending the Taste of Korea Institute on weekendswhere royal recipes are modified for the modern kitchen all while honoring tradition. Thats when I gained respect for every ingredient, and the wisdom of all those before me on how foods should be prepared and preserved. For example, soy sauce was always kept outdoors in onggi, earthenware made with Korean clay thats porous and keeps the sauce alive. When new batches of soy sauce are made, they go into a large onggi, and subsequently smaller onggi lined up like Russian dolls; any leftover soy is poured into the onggi from the previous year, all the way down to a fifteen-year-old aged soy sauce. My life changed forever when I first tasted fifteen-year-old soy sauce. It was dense like caramel. And to season 10 pounds of meat, I needed only 1 tablespoon of that concentrated concoction. Thats when I truly understood what my mentor wanted me to experiencethe true beauty of Korean cuisineand to share this beauty with people outside of Korea.