Eating Your Kimchi

When I started putting stuff together to blog about Korea, the topic of food was a popular request. My sister (have you bought her album yet because you really should) and a nerdy friend of mine both put in requests. So, here’s the tl:dr on Korean food:

It’s really good you guys seriously wow.

Now, this should probably come with a nice fat corollary of ‘if you like strong flavours, can at least tolerate spice and aren’t repulsed by the mere thought of seafood’. If that’s all okay with you, then yes, Korea food is fantastic. If you’re unable to eat fish or anything spicier than a korma, you’ll be able to get by but a lot of options won’t be open to you. I love Korean food – when I went to Japan in 2013, I found myself struck by how bland the food was by comparison and seeking out stronger flavours.

Matt asked me how easy it would be to live in Korea as a vegetarian. The answer would be easier than China, but probably not as easy as in the West. Going out for dinner in Korea is generally some form of meat-based main with vegetables on the side – maybe Korean barbeque or a Western-style steakhouse. Fried chicken is a popular snack and people often have it when they go out drinking, as a side. Noodles are commonly served in a chicken or beef-stock broth, so you’d be best going for noodles without broth. There are no shortage of vegetarian dishes to enjoy; thanks to the influence of Buddhism in the country, there is even temple cuisine you could enjoy as part of a trip. Just be careful when ordering kimbap (rice rolls) because there’s commonly a bit of ham in there.

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You’d probably have an easier time overall going pescetarian for the duration of your stay, depending on the region you’re in. Fermented fish paste (it’s better than it sounds) is commonly served as a side dish to dip or is used as an ingredient in kimchi in some areas. And finally, it’s probably going to be hard to go vegan in Korea because they love to put eggs in things. Egg cakes are a common side dish and are often in kimbap. If you order noodles, it typically comes with a boiled egg in there. If you order a rice dish, it probably comes with fried egg. Avoiding dairy is a bit easier, though.

Now that those questions are done, let’s talk about the most famous Korean food: kimchi. In case you don’t know, kimchi is typically spiced, fermented cabbage. Which sounds weird, I know, but Koreans really dig the stuff; it’s their national dish and during the Korean War easy access to kimchi was considered so vital to South Korean morale that American support was requested to keep supplies open. They’ve even sent it to space.  And it grows on you; the strong, sour and spicy flavour may put you off at first but it pairs so well with rice that you’ll come to crave the stuff.

Kimchi pots are used to store fermenting kimchi for months at a time.

If one kind of kimchi puts you off, it’s worth looking around for another. There are lots of varieties, with different ingredients. Some are made with cucumber, scallions or radish. They will have different levels of sourness, saltiness and spice. Baek kimchi (white kimchi) is prepared entirely without chilli, usually for elderly people or children who have low tolerance for spice. My personal favourite is bokkeum kimchi, which has been stir-fried to give it a milder flavour and softer texture. And unless you’re ordering something with kimchi as a major ingredient, like kimchi jigae (stew), it’s really just an optional side dish.

If you had to ask me what my favourite Korean food was naengmyeon (cold noodles). Korean summers are stupidly hot and so people eat cold noodles – literally served with ice in the bowl – to cool off. Some people say that in hot weather you should eat and drink hot things to cool off. Those people are not in fact human, but devils in human form. If you see one, you are morally obligated to cast them back into the Pit from whence they came and – okay, getting a little off-topic.

Main dish: Bibim naengmyeon. Rectangular dish: kimbap. Side dishes: Sliced radish, kimchi.

Naengmyeon apparently originated in Pyongyang – one variety of the noodles is Pyongyang naengmyeon. But more commonly in the South you’ll find either mul naengmyeon or bibim naengmyeon. Mul naengmyeon is served in a broth and bibim is served without and usually has a chilli sauce instead. Both usually have slices of cucumber, carrot or Korean pear. The long noodles are said to symbolize long life and should be eaten whole, but servers in restaurants often cut the noodles with scissors for ease of eating.

I should probably talk about eating dog in Korea, since it’s something I know has become a cliche about Korean food. It’s not unique to Korea and criticism from the West has made it less common. I’ve never seen anywhere that serves it nor has any Korean I’ve ever spoken to admitted to eating dog. Pet ownership is a fairly new social practice in Korea, but it is growing and they actually have a breed of dog (Nureongi) that was raised more like cattle and not as pets. These dogs are not described with the same word as pet breeds, gyeon, instead called gu (more like ‘mutt). People still do eat dog – there are estimated to be around 600 restaurants in Seoul that illegally serve dog – but it’s generally the older generations, who mostly eat dog-based soups in the summer, and for health reasons.

There is also a pro-dog cuisine movement, but it has come under a lot of fire for cruel methods of slaughtering the animals to tenderize the meat. Technically, South Korean Food Sanitary Law does not list dog as a legal ingredient and restaurants serving dog do so at the risk of their licenses.

Final point: what would you like to read about next? Are there any topics you want to see covered? Leave a comment or tweet your suggestions, feedback and questions.

Waiting For The Trade Part 2

Last time on “Waiting For The Trade”, Idabbled in self-indulgence about why I’m so special and awesome talked about some of the differences between a monthly comic and a trade paperback, and some of the differences I, as a reader, experience going into them. Last time focussed mostly on the artifacts themselves, whereas this time is going to be more about narrative.

THE FINAL CRISIS TRADE

Comics have a weird relationship with narrative structure. Most comics are designed and intended to act as perpetual series’, rather than being conceived in the traditional manner of having a beginning, middle and end to work through. The heroes have an origin, they fight crime – and they keep fighting crime. There’s no real ‘end point’ here. Problems keep coming up to be solved, villains keep escaping jail or returning from the grave to menace the world once more! Even the death of the hero does not draw the story to a close, since they invariably return; I think by this point the list of comic book characters who have stayed dead is shorter than the list of ones who haven’t. Essentially, as long as there’s enough interest in the story to justify the title’s existence, it’ll exist.

That sounds rather cynical, and I suppose it is; the business side of the industry means that in order to sell books, popular characters have to stick around so readers will pay to see their exploits. But that’s a little grander on the scale of what I’m here to look at today. I want to focus more on the narrative differences between a monthly issue and a trade paperback.

A trade is a collection of a story arc, usually six issues worth, from an ongoing monthly series. In other words, the story is the same. But the experience of the story is not, in my opinion. The techniques that writers use don’t necessarily work so well when put together in a trade collection, or the way they approach the story might work well in the monthly series but not in a collection. Final Crisis is probably my favourite talking point in terms of modern comic book narrative.

Like every Crisis before it, Final Crisis was intended as an epic, sprawling narrative across as many DC titles as could be managed. This included short mini-series and stand-alone issues, all giving space for Grant Morrison to do what he does best; crazy-ass, inter-connecting, high-concept sci-fi madness. Space alien gods breaking holes in the universe by dying; cosmic vamprie-gods that feed off of stories; a bullet fired backwards in time; the Ragnarok of the Superheroes; the death and rebirth of everything that exists. All great stuff but it needs space to be explored and fleshed out. When it comes to collecting such a huge narrative, hundreds of characters and complicated motivations, with plot devices that have been set out years ago, how do you adequately put it into a trade?

Someone like me looks at all those Final Crisis titles across the shelves and says ‘screw that, I’m just going to get the trade’. Then I get the trade for Final Crisis and get confused. It’s clear who I’m rooting for, but is Darkseid the big bad or is Mandrakk? First of all it seems Darkseid is all set up to be the big ultimate evil, but then Superman goes and leaves the universe to fight a bigger, ultimater evil – the Mandrakk, a vampiric monster that feeds on the story of the universe. Then we’re back to the war of the superheroes, Darkseid taking over the world and the Justice League resisting him. Also, apparently there’s a team of Japanese popstar/superheroes that don’t really seem to do anything.  Then Mandrakk comes back to menace the world again, but then so does Darkseid. Superman defeats Darkseid’s shattered ghost by singing at it –

No, Really

 – and restores the broken world. Is that something he could always do? Did he get super-singing powers in a spin-off title I missed?

I think I’m rambling now, but the pont is this. Final Crisis The Monthly Series and Final Crisis The Collection are two different experiences because Morrison wasn’t writing a collection. He was writing the series and the collection suffered as a result.