The Gangwon Highlands: Potato and Buckwheat

Gangwon lies on the eastern side of the peninsula, where the Taebaek range runs close to the East Sea and leaves little flat land for rice. The province is divided by the mountains into the highland interior and the narrow coastal strip, and its cooking has always followed that division. Over most of the peninsula the upland is the greater part of the land, and Gangwon is where that fact shapes the table most plainly: the staple grains and tubers here are those that tolerate cold, thin soil and a short season.

Rice is the grain of the plains of Jeolla and Gyeonggi, and it is not the grain of the Gangwon highlands. On the steep, cool slopes the farmer relied on the potato (Solanum tuberosum), buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum), maize, millet and the starchy foods gathered from the hills. The potato reached Korea in the nineteenth century and was taken up readily in cold upland districts where rice would not ripen reliably. It became a food of the mountain household, boiled, steamed, grated and pressed, and kept through the winter. The grated potato shows the cooking best. Peeled potatoes are grated finely, and the pale liquid that drains from the pulp settles, leaving a sediment of starch. The pulp and the starch are combined, seasoned with salt, and fried in oil in a thin pan until the edge is crisp and the centre dense and slightly chewy. This is gamja-jeon, the potato pancake, and in Gangwon it is also made as gamja-ongsimi, small dumplings of grated potato and starch, often with a filling of seasoned vegetables or minced meat, boiled in a clear broth. Where the dish lives or dies is in the handling of the starch: too little and the pancake falls apart, too much and it turns glassy and heavy. Buckwheat is the other pillar of the highland table. It is milled into a flour that has no gluten, so it cannot be kneaded like wheat dough, and the cook works with it by other means. It is stirred into a hot batter for the thin pancake called memil-jeonbyeong, rolled around a filling of seasoned, finely chopped kimchi, and it is cut into the grey-brown noodles of memil-guksu. Buckwheat noodles are eaten cold in a chilled broth in summer, and the Gangwon interior is the country most associated with them. The grain is also the basis of memil-muk, a firm jelly made by cooking the starch with water until it sets, served sliced in a seasoned broth or dressed with soy sauce and sesame oil. The province's two sides complement each other. The mountain interior supplies tubers, grains, wild greens and the dried vegetables that the long winter requires, while the East Sea coast supplies walleye pollock (Gadus chalcogrammus) and squid. Pollock is the fish most closely tied to the province, and it is eaten fresh, frozen, and dried in the cold wind of the highlands as hwangtae, the fish hung through winter freezing and thawing until it is pale and fibrous. Dried pollock is simmered in soup with radish and tofu, and it travelled inland as a preserved food long before refrigeration. The cooking of Gangwon has few of the heavy seasonings found further south. Salt, soy sauce, sesame oil and a modest amount of chilli, the Korean chilli being Capsicum annuum, carry the flavour, and the starchy base of potato and buckwheat is left to speak. The province is a reminder that Korean cooking, so often described through rice and kimchi, rests as well on a cold upland agriculture that produced its own dishes, and these remain the food most readily named as Gangwon's own.

The taste of the highland table is earthy, mild and faintly sweet from the starch, with the nutty bitterness of buckwheat set against the clean saltiness of the seasoning. Texture is its main interest: the crisp edge and chewy centre of the potato pancake, the soft resilience of buckwheat noodles, the cool firmness of the jelly. These foods are usually eaten with a dipping sauce of soy sauce, vinegar and a little chilli, which sharpens the plain starch without covering it.