Cold Pork: Or, the Trouble of Translation
Reflections from a couple of days interning at a remarkable restaurant in Seoul, learning about ancient Korean culinary traditions--and a blueprint for future research and writings.
Chef Park couldn’t quite find the words in English, so he reached for his phone. He opened up Google Translate and typed a sentence in Korean, holding the phone up to me. “Pork has a cold nature,” it read.
I had asked him why he and his team at their restaurant, Onjium, center their menu around beef and seafood in January. Seafood made sense to me, the colder waters in the Sea of Japan bringing out the best in fish. At dinner there that same night, I’d have an ancient Korean Royal Family dish of cold seafood soup in a pine nut sauce with Asian Pear, a selection of raw fish sashimi, and a deceivingly simple steamed snapper and vegetable salad that might have been my favorite dish of the night. As for beef, I learned something completely new: that beef is fattier in winter around Seoul, as they sit on their haunches all day to stay warm. Too much walking in the summer, Chef Park told me, meaning more lean meat.
And as for pork?
Google Translate is a funny thing. A powerful tool, surely, but I’ve come to think of it how Susan Sontag thought of the camera: that it distorts the truth even as it tries to capture it.
Were it not for a year-long herbalism program I took a few years back, I think even more of Korean cooking would fly over my head than already does. I just spent two days interning at the restaurant, learning how to make Doenjang, or the Korean form of miso—more on this wild, ancient technique in later writing. The brand of Korean cooking as seen at Onjium is one steeped in history and tradition, which here means food as medicine. For each ingredient, a different energy, a different set of uses. Which is to say that flavor, though important, is not the only driving force.
“Pork has a cold nature,” Google Translate said. Pork, according to Korean wisdom, is cooling for the body, making it a better fit for the warmer month. Beef, conversely, warms. Seafood? It depends, Chef Park told me. Chicken soup is one thing, but this sort of wisdom runs deeper.
But how much of this can one really get across in words? How does that translate into our own American culture, where we are used to being able to want and get anything we want, in any given season? The English language can be blunt, full of disparate words and concepts; I often settle on the word nourishment to describe the kind of food I want to cook, but that’s the best I’ve come up with with the tools at hand. Indigenous practices in the United States, as well as foodways from a whole myriad of cultures, all weave together flavor and medicine and something beyond those things altogether into breath and action–it’s just that we’ve written over all those foodways in the name of progress and novelty and wealth.
There are many things this Substack isn’t–a casual travel guide, an influencer’s blog, a purely recipe driven account–but at least what it is for me is a space to document and share what I’m learning. But the places I visit tend to all have this in common: a cuisine deeply connected to its roots. Ancient practices, and a new wave of ambitious chefs and farmers rising up to keep these traditions alive. I think that’s worth documenting.
And then this: the reason to ditch the words altogether and go experience: while the whole experience at Onjium was powerful, the whole mass of new teachings and recipes and generosity all swelled together in one sweeping wave during my dinner there, about two-thirds of the way through the meal, transporting me somewhere I haven’t been in a while.
Korean meals are a remarkable teacher, you see, something of a natural Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Banchan, or the small plates of kimchi, gochujang, fresh vegetables and herbs, and more dot the table in front of you, offering a build-your-own-adventure of some salt here, sweetness there, heat and umami to your liking. And by the time the fourth course came around, an Abalone and Rice Cake soup, with one fresh kimchi and one aged sesame leaf kimchi on the side, and the Sochu and rice wine working their magic, all these building pieces came together into something harmonious. It all made sense to me–I don’t know how else to word it. It simply made sense, the warming and fortifying qualities of the traditional New Years Day soup, the ribbons of cooked egg yolk on top to add richness, the rice on the side to cleanse, the light and herbaceous condiments to season. Flavors, history, energetics, and more all in brief and spectacular unison. Deeply rooted, grounded food-yet I felt as if I could float away
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