Fashion
This Soup Should Always Be on the Table
A beefy, brothy Korean soup, is as reliable as it is ubiquitous.
Credit…Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Megan Hedgpeth.
I come from water people. My mother, Jean, grew up in Jeonju, the capital of North Jeolla, a province on South Korea’s west coast known for its salt-preserved seafood, assertively seasoned cooking and clear spring water. It’s said that the same water makes the region’s bean sprouts especially sweet, germinating them, then eventually extracting their gentle flavor, as in one of the city’s signature dishes, bean-sprout soup with rice.
Recipe: Gukbap (Beef and Bean Sprout Soup With Rice)
In Korean cuisine, a scoop of steamed white rice nestled inside a bowl of brothy soup, or gukbap, forms a wide category of healing meals. Many things can become gukbap, like those bean sprouts and rice (kongnamul gukbap), our house brew when I was growing up; pork bones and rice (dwaeji gukbap); and beef, radish and rice (sogogi gukbap). There’s always rice, or bap, which also means meal in Korean. To some ears, then, gukbap could be translated to “soup meal,” breakfast, lunch or dinner, not least because that one bowl contains protein, carbohydrates, vegetables, fat, everything. Build a meal around soup — or build a life around it, as my family has, a pot ever-simmering on the stove — and you might slowly find yourself healed.
Soup rice eases as it goes down. My friend Matt Rodbard, who was a writer of the cookbooks “Koreaworld” and “Koreatown,” calls gukbap a “utility player,” because it can be served in the morning, “for fortifying a hangover or just getting you a solid foundation for the day,” or in the evening with soju, to catch (or extend) the night’s excesses. My father, Ki, who grew up in Seoul and visits there regularly, associates gukbap restaurants with the smell of alcohol emanating from the other diners. If some people have a second stomach for dessert, Koreans have one for gukbap, as reliable as it is ubiquitous, a foundation of daily life. If you grew up in a Korean household as I did, you might not have paused to appreciate gukbap, because it’s just always there, right alongside the napkin holder and the salt and pepper shakers.
