Jules Chung

Butter and Gochujang

I wax about gochujang the way some do about butter.
My mother, belly still aching from the childhood scar of war,
has always adored the stuff. Butter is richness, peace in all
the senses. She ate slatherings of it while I grew inside
her. I love butter too, but an equal star of the palate
is gochujang, the most sensual of pastes. The carmine of
drying blood or scarlet of cherries, a puree thick, viscous,
clinging more ferociously than peanut butter to a spoon.
Suffused in soups, stews that bubble like lava in small cauldrons
ferried to the table as casually as sorbet. Mixed
into sprightly dips for quivering oysters, abalone
and sheer slices of raw fish cut razor-thin, almost lacy.
Dressing extra-fine cold noodles, bathing each strand, balls of red
threads served in frosty metal bowls kept on ice so that the fire
on the tongue is cold to the touch if not to the taste. To see
this basic from Umma’s pantry on every hip menu, on
every cooking show, sends me on epic journeys of the mind.
I think of Portuguese ships bringing chilis to Korea
during what is commonly known as the sixteenth century.
How conquest comes in many forms; so-called ethnic food’s just food.
I remember as a child dipping dried anchovies into
bowls of gochujang the way some dip baby carrots into
hummus and I think how at the root of everything, at the
thirsty, pulpy bottom, is a giant, rumbling appetite.