Bulgogi,
Korean barbecue “my way”
IN
traditional societies and cultures, certainly,
the passing down of recipes from mother to daughter
(usually) is one way of keeping taste, national,
local and familial culture and food intact. Traditional
recipes may change little as they are passed down
the generations because one learns 'the right'
way to do them, i.e. mother's (or grandmother's)
way. However, today, with families often living
far apart, the extended family no longer reality
for most of us, the ties that bind are nowhere
near as strong, so inevitably more radical recipe
mutations may occur down the line.
In
my own personal experience, this evolution can
be rather like a game of chinese whispers (or
should I say korean), with our own end results
often very different, sometimes hardly recognisable,
from, say, my grandmother's original, yet still
undeniably rooted to that original. Such variations
may be as much a reflection of place and culture
as time and space since we literally inhabit very
different worlds (physically, culturally, generationally,
emotionally). To raise the dreaded 'f' word again,
this is how true fusion foods are often created,
as a perfectly natural evolutionary process.
An
example: one of the most delicious mainstays of
the Korean kitchen is bulgogi, marinaded barbecued
beef. My grandmother liked to prepare bulgogi
in the classic traditional Korean way: she'd cut
the meat in fine, thin strips, then marinade in
soy sauce, garlic, ginger, and toasted sesame
seeds. The meat ideally ought to be cooked at
the table, on a domed brass shield as part of
a communal cooking-and-eating experience. Halmoni
would always insist on doing this herself, as
she liked to be in control, using metal chopsticks
to pick out the choicest titbits for those in
her favour — I usually scored big since I
was a favourite (if prodigal) grandson. As the
meat was cooked you'd take a piece of lettuce,
add a spoon of steamed white rice, perhaps a bit
of chili-tinted kochujang, and finally a bit of
the char-grilled meat; then you'd roll it all
up and eat with the fingers. Wonderful!
My
mother, growing up in Hawaii and California, on
the other hand, where meat was plentiful and relatively
inexpensive, would keep the meat in fairly large
pieces, scored deeply in a diamond pattern with
a knife then beaten thin with a meat hammer. The
marinade was basically similar, though Mom added
vinegar and heaps of springs onions, didn't bother
with the toasted sesame (a very distinctive, and
to my mind, essential flavouring). She always
like to cook Korean barbecue (rarely called it
bulgogi) over a charcoal-fired hibachi in the
backyard. The meat was served more like an American
style char-grilled steak, together always with
a huge pot of rice and a green salad dressed with
vinaigrette. Equally wonderful and probably my
all-time favourite desert island meal.
Me,
I love both of the above but I still can't help
fiddling around with variations, attempting, perhaps,
to gild gold. I love to use the basic marinade
for sirloin steaks: cooked over charcoal, then
served with a fusion sauce that is a sort of Cabernet-infused
beurre blanc made with the strained leftover marinade.
It works well.
Tonight
I'll do something different. I've
got a thick piece of rump steak, scored but not
hammered, marinading in the pugent mix of soy
sauce, garlic, ginger and sesame. I plan to cook
this over charcoal for only the briefest period,
say 5 minutes in total, and then leave to rest
for 10 minutes. Then I'll slice the meat on the
slant into the thinnest pieces — nicely charred
on the outside, pink closer to the surface, bloody
red and raw in the middle. Spoon a heaping mound
of organic shortgrain brown rice (what, brown
rice?!) into the middle of a huge wooden platter,
and all around and over, I'll arrange a bed of
organic mizuna, peppery wild rocket, and herbs,
all from our local organic farm, Highfield. The
sliced char-grilled meat goes on top of this,
and on top of the sliced meat, a heap of thinly
sliced radishes, shredded spring onions, chopped
coriander and of course a sprinkle of the toasted
sesame seeds. Then I'll dress the whole lot with
the strained marinade together with a generous
squeeze of the juice from a couple of limes.
Purists
may throw their hands up in horror, but this to
me is undoubtedly bulgogi — Korean barbecue
— though unmistakably a product of this particular
moment in time and space. And indeed the mix —
of soft lettuce leaves, steamed rice, and fire-grilled
meat — makes this a variation or perhaps
a, oh, what shall we say, 'a post-modern interpretation'
of Halmoni's lettuce-and-rice-and-grilled-meat
ritual, the classic Korean sangchussamjang.
I
wonder if Halmoni, who passed away earlier this
year age 94, would have liked it? Though she lived
in the United States for nearly 80 years yet still
never really learned to speak English, she was
in many ways a modern woman and not all that resistant
to change. So my guess is that, yes, this might
just pass muster.
