Back to the Beginning
This is not going to be a recipe post. I would love for it to be, because if it were, it would mean that the seolgi ddeok (steamed rice cake) in that photo up there didn’t just look alright, but also tasted alright. It didn’t. And this was take three.
Here’s a photo of take one taken in the early dawn hours to send to Stepho Snacks, in Glasgow, because at that point it was still funny. There is no photo of take two, because by then, it had stopped being funny.
But by this time around, another kind of feeling had started to take over. As I gently slid the ddeok out of the molds, cautiously optimistic based on the look of things, I made a comment to B about how was I meant to cope if I couldn’t even manage to get seolgi ddeok — the Korean equivalent of basic yellow cake — under my belt. B retorted that most Koreans my age couldn’t make it either, so why was I so worried?
What I’m about to say is not the only or even the main reason why learning how to do these things is important to me, but it was the first thing that popped into my head and then, respectively, out of my mouth.
“Just… for example, right? Say we did have kids. And then say we did move to another country. How sad would it be to have a couple of Korean kids who had never eaten ddeok?”
B raised an eyebrow. “That would be no good. But ‘a couple’?”
“Just like for example.”
“But you don’t want kids.”
“I’m just saying, for example. What I mean is, I don’t want to regret anything. I mean I don’t want to not know how to do something. This damn rice flour. Every time it’s something.”
The next morning, standing in my kitchen mixing batter for blueberry donuts and listening to Ryan Adams’ album Heartbreaker, which always makes me melancholy and homesick, I felt different. I felt like I was at home and far from home at the same time. I knew the donuts were going to turn out. I knew exactly how the wheat flour, the butter and the eggs would behave.
But isn’t that why I left home? Because I knew exactly how everything there would turn out?
I know the name of this blog is weird. It’s too long and it reveals nothing about the subject matter of the blog, two things everyone advises against when it comes to choosing a blog name. But the name isn’t random. It comes from the last line of a poem I wrote following a feverish series of dreams I had my senior year in college.
I was struggling with my identity in the strangest way possible. University had forced me to come face to face with my working classness, my southernness, at the exact same moment I was pushing out of both of those boxes. But it’s when you go outside that you really become what you are. The contrast forces it.
In the dreams, I had been wandering through the woods for days. I came to a cabin, where I found a small cedar box. Inside was a folded up piece of paper with my name written on it. I heard an internal voice — the kind that you have in dreams — tell me to follow the river north when the call came, that I would find “more brothers” at the end of the journey. I stepped outside to find a stream, which I set out to follow uphill. Then I woke up, and the dreams stopped.
What I’m finding through the journey is where I came from. More brothers — the blood bonds I didn’t know I had. Food is right at the core of it. Last year, when I sat out in a cornfield in Gangwon-do discussing Korean cornbread with the farmer, it was my great grandmother’s cast iron skillet that came to mind, and how she taught me that a skillet should never be washed. When the head of the farmer’s co-op explained that the corn harvest was a celebration when he was a kid, because it was the first substantial crop to come up after the long, cold winter and the light spring greens, when everyone was hungry, I remembered my grandmother laughing as she told me the story about how her and her bothers would crawl under the egg man’s truck when he came around and steal eggs through a hatch under the layers. When we went to the aehobak (Korean zucchini) farm in Andong, I baked zucchini bread for the crew and brought it along — it’s what the neighbors used to bring to my grandparents’ house at Christmas time.
When I bake in an oven with wheat flour and butter, I remember that this also started somewhere. This, at some point, was also hard and unpredictable. The only thing to do is keep at it. And someday, I will wake up, and learning how to make ddeok will be a part of my history. And knowing how to make it will have become a part of my identity, just like the eggs and the skillet and the yellow cake.
