The Corean Epistles

Makgeolli Diary #5

2010-06-12T01:51:00.000-07:00

I came to the farming town of Cheonan in January 2010, the month/year when I decided, at first with vague interest, to write on makgeolli. Cheonan traditionally is the middle passage city where merchants, travelers, and officials stayed for a time before continuing onward to Seoul, or if they were heading south, to the Jeonlla-do (Jeonju, Gwangju) and Kyeongsan-do (Gyeongju, Busan) provinces. The city preserves its former reststop prestige in the odd existence of luminous well-kept hotels/motels in a small nightclub district visible from any area in town. A mini Reno of sorts that resurrects at night in the Vegas-like spectacle of nightclubs, massage parlors, and love motels.

But Cheonan, before any of these gaudy structures came to existence, was a provincial farming town adorned with numerous rice and grain fields that spread out in green Mondrianesque square-and-rectangle graphs. Only recently has the town gained a new reputation as a site for industrial growth, where massive Samsung and LG factories (and scores of other lesser known industries) have taken root alongside the farming villages. It is a common, indeed conflicting, sight to see a large Samsung plant that manufactures cell phone touch screens seated next to acres of rice farms. The old and the new are at home in Cheonan.

Any town or city in the corean peninsula with a respectable history is keen to boast a certain fame for artisanship or cuisine. Jeonju is famous for bibimbap; Kangjin is famous for celadon pottery. Cheonan is famous for ho-du gwa-ja (호두과자, walnut cakes filled with sweet redbean). To me however Cheonan should be just as known for producing a high-quality saeng makgeolli. Simply titled Cheonan Saeng Makgeolli, it is a particularly white takju with a pronounced sweetness that doesn't come across as too saccharine. The whiteness I attribute to its 90% rice constituent, the other 10% being flour. This mak is extremely drinkable (as in one can polish off a bottle or two on one's own with ease), light-bodied and none too gassy, yet the rice is very forthcoming in the taste. At the moment certainly in the top ten of maks I've tasted.

If there is anything I adore as much as makgeolli, it is jokbal (족발, ham hocks, pig's feet cooked with soy sauce and spices). There is a ritual every Tuesday where I visit a local grocers' market, find my jokbal man, and amble off to the market to purchase a bottle of Cheonan Saeng Ssal Makgeolli. The combination the two make is hands down the most consistently rewarding meal I can have in Corea. Naturally, too much pigfoot will make one a bit ill or undernourished, so it's wise to pair it with fresh tofu and kimchi. (Being in Corea grants one the extra privilege of finding organic freshly-made tofu not at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's but at the local grocer's market. As if destined to magnetise me every Tuesday, the tofu man places his truck across the way from the jokbal man.)

Makgeolli Diary #4

2010-06-11T04:36:00.000-07:00

4 years ago heralded the first time I came to the Han Land; and exactly 4 years ago was when the 2006 World Cup commenced in Germany. The summers in Corea were humid and still are and have always been: a novel temperature that favorably kept you up late nights when the time zone in Germany was ill-matched with Seoul's and you had to gather up the remainder of your youth and keep up with the drinking and compete with the shouting and hustle with the mobbing red-shirts who swarmed into bars and cried when their team lost an opportunity or clamored when a hard-earned goal was carved into the defensive mold. Those were memorable nights, of outdoor barbecues and Andong soju and fight songs all day and all night long, the drums beating in a perennial distance and the clap of hands a multitude.

This year the 2010 World Cup is being held in South Africa. The first game, which will premiere in only a few hours, stars the host nation, South Africa, in a turf war with my blood nation, Mexico. To mark the event several makgeolli distilleries are distributing futbol-special brands, and I rushed to try one: Ah-Dong's "Football Love" (Chuku Sarang) Saeng Makgeolli. In honor of my team, I'm pairing the crisp lip-smacking makgeolli with my version of the LA-inspired bulgogi taco: this time paired with a robust salsa concocted by my lady, and hand-made corn tortillas pressed by yours truly (using Maseca corn flour). In a twist of invention -- by no means intentional, but coincidental and of the moment -- I've topped the tacos off with olive-oily cubes of feta cheese. The result of the game is as yet unknown (but Mexico will, as they must, win) -- but the bulgogi tacos-and-mak combination will have to remain a success known thus far by a single mexican on earth. Los Angeles, far away and caught up in the Lakers-Celtics series, knows nothing of my pleasure tonight! Que viva Mexico!

Makgeolli Diary #3

2010-06-09T03:04:00.000-07:00

I hadn't mentioned what foods go well with draught makgeolli (or with Seoul Saeng for that matter) but I will make a quick reference to the two corean staples I had eaten with a few bottles of Seoul Saeng (again, this was in 2006). First there is hong-eo sam-bap (pictured above), which is basically raw fermented skate paired with boiled pork and aged kimchi and wrapped in any of a variety of fresh lettuce and cabbage. If the aged kimchi does not already offend novice palettes (it is considerably aged and extremely rank and sharp; it is to kimchi what Roquefort is to blue cheese) then a deep whiff of the raw fermented skate (a river fish that I had never heard of before) will certainly destroy the courage of people whose stomachs can handle nothing more adventurous than bread and cheese. I do not claim to love hong-eo (and indeed even the average corean is loath to eat it) but I do claim that it is perfectly complemented by makgeolli, particularly a mak containing more flour base than rice (more on this differentiation in a later post). Eating hong-eo sam-bap, I found the boiled pork very nicely buffering the strength of the hong-eo, while the aged kimchi balanced out the smell and taste as well:

For an alternate menu dish, kimchi padjeon is an all-time favorite, and an easy replacement for the demanding, stifling flavor of hong-eo:

Makgeolli Diary #2

2010-06-05T01:30:00.000-07:00

When had it begun, this love for makgeolli? It wasn't immediate, as I had hinted, and perhaps -- indeed it is very likely -- I would have never fancied the rice wine had I never encountered draught makgeolli (in corean: saeng makgeolli -- 생(生) 막걸리). My first encounter with draught mak (in 2006) took shape in the famed green plastic bottle of Seoul Jang-Su, undoubtedly the most prominent, omnipresent of all such rice wines. When one considers the propensities and body, the familiar crisp tangy taste of draught mak, it is this bottle, this classic label, which calls the drink into being.

By way of explanation, Seoul Saeng (as I affectionately call it) is the Coca-Cola of makgeolli: its original formula cannot be reproduced, is probably guarded with the same zeal with which renaissance guildsmen kept inner circle trade secrets undisclosed. Draught mak is essentially carbonated makgeolli, resulting in a shorter shelf life than its non-carbonated version (which in contrast can be stored away for months without loss in its quality). In 2006 the life of a typical bottle of draught mak would reach only 7 days at most; after which the carbonation gas, seeping through the smallest cracks of the poorly sealed bottle, would spoil the lactic acid bacteria in the drink. Now in 2010, on the heels of a makgeolli renaissance (among the new hipster college youth and among the more discerning foreigners), the standards of quality and production have dramatically altered. Not only are there more makgeolli brewers emerging on the market, but brewing technology, bottling, and distribution have also vastly improved. A bottle of Seoul Saeng (or any widely available bottle of draught makgeolli) now lasts at least 2 weeks, and whereas in the years prior one had to down all 750ml of the bottle lest it go to waste the next day, one can drink half the bottle and save the rest for tomorrow or the day after (or the day after that) and the drink won't lose much of its crisp taste or sharpness.

The familiar manual act which came to be part and parcel of the draught mak experience was the preliminary shaking of the bottle. I remember once lunching at a FamilyMart (the 7-Eleven of Japan/Corea) with a friend and discussing something or other about books, when I became distracted by the sight of a middle-aged corean man, his face burnt dark by the sun, his eyes looking weary & abstracted and his hands gnarled by day-labor of some kind, sitting on his own and slowly, methodically, shaking a green bottle of Seoul Saeng. The manner in which he shook that bottle captivated me, and in those days it was something of an art not to shake too vigorously, or else the carbonated drink would bubble up and shoot out in violence when you unscrewed the cap; nor too complacently, or you wouldn't get the rich white rice-and-flour grain mixed in the wine. Nowadays the mak tech is so refined that you can have a manic shake of the bottle and the white stuff won't burst out and get all over the place: you pour it out exquisite-like, and the wine foams up very lovingly in your drinking bowl.

Makgeolli Diary #1

2010-06-03T04:19:00.000-07:00

I don't recall perfectly when I first drank makgeolli, but the occasion would have taken place in the year 2006, the time of my first residence in the Han Land. It must have been the winter. (I think that I was) surprised that the round gold-aluminum pitcher brought over to our warm-lit lacquered wood table poured out a corean liquor as white as winter light -- so it seemed to me -- in the dense fog of an early morning in the north country. Hadn't expected to be drinking milk and tasting it it surely wasn't so -- the albino liquor was (to my foolish "cultured" tongue) as bland as it looked and carried none of the full-bodied succulence that red wines promise in their aging and aromas and oak casks. But the visual impression, as it were, of seeing a peculiar whiteness suddenly rise up from a depth of blue, stayed with me.

It was winter (yes, I believe it was) and snow slept soundly outside our frosted window, snug on the moist streets and clinging to the naked ink skeletons of trees. (The occasion of my first encounter with the drink was around the time I wrote the 2nd Epistle to a friend of mine who also spent her days gazing at snow outside her window in a country as far away from me as I was from my own.) In the summer -- I wouldn't know it then as I know it so fecklessly now -- I'd be similarly alarmed at the distinctive whiteness, the whiteness which sent a languorous thrill up my leg, of the sculpted gams of coreanas. A whiteness which had the distinctive glaze + crack of white celadon porcelain. (See my 3rd Epistle.) But none of these pictures was as clear to me then as the image is diaphanous to me now: that when I poured out the spume-stuff into my dented aluminum bowl the cool liquid swooshed in and just sat there, resplendent and glimmering under the gauzy lamp, as if it were eggnog sunk in a bed of false gold. If you let it sit there too long and gave it no lip service the rice-and-flour pap that gave the stuff its whiteness would break up little by little and sink someways to the bottom. You'd have to let it sit an entire day for the liquor to achieve complete platonic separation from its bridal pap. But it was best to court them again, arouse them with a spoon for instance, that the two elements -- soil and river, cloud and air, rice and liquor -- resume their amorous elemental relation.

The corean men who I'd later learn from when I drank with them (I remember) would stick their pinky into the drink bowl and stir with lackadaisical ease, reviving in lazy gentle circles the whiteness of the drink in much the way that a bloom rises in an old-world woman's cheek when she is lovingly caressed for the first or final time. But at that hour -- it was night and it was winter and it was 2006 -- I used a spoon and admired the way the white cloud of the drink would swirl up and rejoin the alcohol, reminding me of those childhood days when I joyed to drink milk, fiendishly, covetously, whenever I was thirsty in place of water even, because milk had the maternal whiteness of my mother and the holy whiteness of the Virgin Maria and the supernal whiteness of the colorless stars -- and I would joy to see how perfectly white milk was and drank it in a glass reserved by me for the drinking of milk alone, believing (as only a child would) that my bones rejoiced in the calcium and that the whites of my eyes would turn whiter, and my vision improve, and my teeth grow strong... But I no longer drink milk as I used to, when "I was young and easy under the apple boughs", because I'm no longer so young or easy. But I do -- and will always -- drink makgeolli -- with a love inexplicable if it had not been, first and foremost, for its albinism. This was the first thing I knew of...

Prologue

2010-06-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

The project here is a renovation of an old one, no longer existent -- the original weblog's blogspot address has merely dropped the "the" in "The Corean Epistles" -- so this one has replaced the old one. Much of the original content will eventually be re-posted: because the project is not so much a blog as a way of publishing and making web-available the author's not inconsiderable experiences in the Han Land and his ruminations thereof. Hence the plan has no purpose other than to reengage with the author's on-and-off courtship of South Korea, a country which he finds himself returning to against his ordinary sanction but very much to his extraordinary liking. Whoever stumbles on this blog is forewarned that the "Corea" which makes its presence here is a convoluted fabrication based as much on nonfiction as it is on the author's conceits. Moreover, old and new content will make appearances in no chronological order, as the author fancies it. But he will attempt to be clearheaded in any case.

Finally, this project will trace and divulge the mystic history of the author's enamouring with the corean rice wine known as makgeolli. His "diaries" on the white-lipped wine may be considered love letters -- epistles -- to the drink proper, and a testament of his devotion to it.