Budae-jjigae and the American Bases

Budae-jjigae (부대찌개), literally army-base stew, belongs to the years after the Korean War (1950–1953), when the peninsula was divided and American forces were stationed in the south. It is associated above all with the towns of Gyeonggi Province around the bases, Uijeongbu chief among them, where the stew is still sold under that town's name.

The dish grew out of scarcity. In the aftermath of the war, much of the population had little to eat, and the American bases were a source of tinned and processed provisions that were otherwise out of reach: Spam and other luncheon meat, sausages, baked beans, processed cheese. Cooks in the surrounding towns combined these with what the Korean kitchen already supplied, and the result was a stew built on the grammar of the jjigae rather than on any foreign model. The foundation is a seasoned broth, typically coloured and sharpened with gochugaru (the Korean chilli, Capsicum annuum) and given depth by gochujang or doenjang, with kimchi cooked down into it. Into this broth go the cured meats, sliced and arranged in the pot, together with tofu, scallions, rice cakes and instant noodles, which entered the Korean diet in the decades after the war. The pot is brought to the table and finished over a flame, so that the diners add and eat in stages, as with other communal jjigae. Processed cheese is often laid over the top and melts into the broth. What reads as improvisation is in fact a disciplined balance: the fat and salt of the cured meat are answered by the acidity of aged kimchi and the heat of the chilli, and the noodles are added last so that they keep their spring. The stew carried a social meaning that its ingredients make plain. It was food made from what could be obtained near the bases, and for some years it was spoken of with the awkwardness that attends the memory of hardship and dependence. Its later standing changed as the generation that grew up on it prepared it for their families, and as it came to be served in restaurants as a dish of its own, often for groups and at the table with a burner. Roy Choi, in L.A. Son, places Korean cooking in the American setting from the other side of the Pacific, as the food of a family and a neighbourhood shaped by migration, and his account of mixing Korean flavour with what the American kitchen offered sits close to the same instinct that made the stew: the Korean palate absorbing foreign material on its own terms. The cook who prepares budae-jjigae should therefore treat it as a Korean stew first. A broth made with care, whether from anchovy and kelp or from beef, and kimchi that has properly soured, decide the result more than the choice of sausage. The foreign provisions supply fat and salt, and the broth must be strong enough to carry them.

The stew is salty, fatty and sharply sour at once, with the chilli heat sitting beneath. The cured meats give richness, the aged kimchi gives acidity, and the noodles and rice cakes give body. It is eaten hot from the shared pot, with rice, and the broth thickens and deepens as the meal goes on.