Bulgogi and its Undeserved Place at the Top
International night was held in the dim-lighted cafeteria on shitty, wobbly plastic tables - you know the ones. In my first elementary school, our handful of Korean families would come together to do a little section of Korea when we still had Girls’ Generation as an up and coming band, far before the reverberations of “Gangnam Style.”
The homemade food would come in these large aluminum pans, which steamed up like something crazy when you very slowly uncrimped the edges that secured the plastic tops. The food was almost always this:
Japchae
Bulgogi
NO KIMCHI. Kimchi had been relegated to the back of the Korean food hierarchy, as a sort of shameful open secret. I distinctly remember a book I read in elementary school where the characters claimed that the rented apartment stank because the renters were Korean and ate kimchi.
People went batshit for bulgogi. Even in the 2000s, when Korea was just a dim background set of grandparental photos and the march of time towards Vietnam, the 80% white parent population of Seven Locks Elementary school was obsessed with it. I remember watching fathers come up for seconds and thirds and sometimes even fourths, a Korean mom ladling the old-school soupy bulgogi with enoki mushrooms onto fluted paper plates, the clear broth threatening to spill over. The japchae had brief forays by the most experimental individuals, but I often got to take home heaping plates of it (much to my glee).
Although I doubt that my elementary school was the epicenter that changed American popular opinion on Korean cuisine, it was true that during those crucial elementary school years I lived in, Korean food began to be recognizable among the general population. It was usually described in less than pleasant terms (National Geographic Almanac claimed that Koreans ate an “icky” seaweed soup for each birthday - the birthday part is true).
Around 2010, the tone towards Korean food shifted, maybe thanks to the general feeling of being "done with racism" due to the Obama administration, maybe thanks to a conflation with Japanese cuisine, maybe because of the first wave of Hallyu. Within a couple years of elementary school the reaction to my Korean identity changed from the Korean War ("are you from North or South Korea?") to glee in their worldliness of knowing what Korean food was and enjoying it (Korean food being just bulgogi).
Even now, a cursory search into bulgogi touts it as a "Symbol of Korean Cuisine," or "Korea's Most Delicious Export," as Smithsonian Magazine claims rather dubiously. The same source states that it is a staple of Korean households, ignoring the many different stews and soups paired with rice that are considered key to a good dinner.
The Wikipedia page for bulgogi is especially damning - it contains pages of etymology, history, conflation with nobility, preparation, serving style. In contrast, there is no page for Korean soups.
The thing is, I don't really know of any family that eats bulgogi regularly. I personally hate bulgogi. I hate soupy bulgogi with broth and mushrooms, and I hate grilled bulgogi. Anytime I see that wrinkled mess of beef it fills me with anger and rage that no other foodstuff can do. The marinade that is so beloved by its fans acts as a way to cover up the fact that it isn’t a good way to cook meat - why slice it into these thin pieces to get these weirdo squiggles that almost don’t work like meat? There’s no chew to it, and the meat flavor is totally obscured by the overwhelming sweet marinade.
I think part of bulgogi’s fame comes from the fact that beef was and still is relatively rare in Korea. Korean barbecue is actually much more affordable in the US because buying any cut of beef is prohibitively expensive. There are several reasons for this (lack of space for beef, historical precedence, strict trade laws against mad cow disease - there’s actually a lot of academic reading on this if you want a rabbithole) but it leads to beef being used as a nicer meal.
It might be an Italian immigrant situation, in that case — much like how Italian-American food adapted vigorously to the abundance and cheapness of meat in the US, Korean immigrants might have turned to bulgogi as an easy and filling meal that was surprisingly cheap to make. My own parents would load every dish with stewing beef to the point that I was surprised to find pork in most of the family dishes I had in Korea.
So, an influx of bulgogi in the local Korean cuisine. But why did The American Populace choose it as the champion of Korean couture and as the interface which Korean food would be seen as?
Even with true-to-form Korean food, recipes straight from the homeland, it’s often selected out of by recipe publishers. If a recipe doesn’t get published, it can’t get to home chefs. Maangchi, an internet celebrity chef - who I can personally confirm holds on to true Korean cuisine - herself claims that “The food is sweeter, saltier, less spicy, less fishy and less rich with umami than it should be.” She struggled with including classic Korean dishes like kelp stock and jellyfish salad to her publishers, just four years ago. Kelp stock (also called kombu stock), for reference, is used in almost every soup in Korean and Japanese cuisine. If you’ve ever enjoyed cup ramen, congrats; you’ve enjoyed kelp stock.
This isn’t an issue with Korean food specifically — the “ethnic” trend is a problem that plagues American food magazines and restaurants. These sites have found a lot of success with adding in a couple of recipes that come from different cultures and cuisines. A look into New York Times Cooking’s homepage reveals tomato-braised chickpeas with tahini, ropa vieja, green and beans doenjang. Bon Appetit features slow roast gochujang chicken, chicken katsu sandwiches, garlic miso butter mashed potatoes.
There’s not necessarily a problem with any of these recipes in a vacuum, but the Bon Appetit scandal (https://www.insider.com/bon-apptit-timeline-allegations-drama-culture-race-andy-alex-sohla-2020-6) was one reveal that these dishes that seemed to explore cuisine from different cultures were centered around white tastes and an almost fully white editorial team. This has precedence with different white cookbook authors who are able to leverage their whiteness to make “ethnic” recipes “safe” for the everyday American audience — see Alison Roman and her so-called #thestew, which exploded on social media but could be argued to just be a curry. Why call it #thestew? Is it to make it more appealing and less scary to potential cooks? Why do we have to make it less scary in the first place? What about Stephanie Danler, who was highlighted on T magazine for her cookbook. In that article, Danler talks about how she went on a “kitchari” cleanse; the actual name of the food is “khichdi” or “khichri.” Incredibly, T magazine takes her word on the terminology and uses it in the caption of the image adorning the article. “Kitchari,” it starts, “a soothing meal of brown rice and red lentils.”
Bulgogi is just another case of a “discovery” by white recipe writers and cooking magazine editors. Deemed banal enough to not serve as a threat (unlike something with a scary name like blood sausage, nevermind that blood sausage is european as well), and yet different enough to bring in a sense of daring and worldliness to their columns, it’s become the perfect poster child of Korean food. That’s a pattern with the Korean food that’s become popular here — Korean fried chicken, gochujang. Korean foods aren’t able to stand on their own in recipe books. They have to be easily recognizable variants of “safe” foods. Bulgogi is just slices of steak; gochujang is stuck into anything from a glaze for ribs, to spice up a grilled cheese, or to mix into gazpacho. The New York Times claims bulgogi is "easy to make and fun to eat; it’s no wonder it is one of the country’s most successful culinary exports.” Are other Korean foods too difficult for families to attempt, in a world where making your own sourdough and baking three layered cakes have become hobbies for the everyday home cook? Is pork belly too scary to eat? Are Korean soups too unfun for the average American customer?
I think recipe writers know their own conceit with their approach to cuisines from non-European cultures. There’s a strange need to justify American favorites of cultural dishes via historical research and an intense archiving of its preparation, which includes taking note of “family traditions” (what food doesn’t have family traditions behind it?) and over generalization of the population (apparently Korean homes tend to own a small stove just for cooking bulgogi - why? It can be easily prepared on a stove).
Maybe bulgogi is supposed to serve as a type of ethnography, where a picturesque painting of a traditional Korean family at home is created for the outside American audience. This food acts as a type of voyeurism for the general American audience, for a conceited belief that one has an understanding of a culture via their consumption of a dish picked specifically for their own American tastes.
The New York Times, in an older article, claims that "According to Korean tradition, you must finish [bulgogi] in a single bite!" The actual rule is that it’s considered rude to take bites out of a bigger piece instead of cutting up smaller bits.
I guess if this article fills you with guilt or whatever, it shouldn’t. I don’t really mean this as a call to gatekeep people from Korean cuisine, or to say that Korean cuisine should be kept “pure”. There are a lot of overlaps in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Thai cuisine in the first place. And I think the Korean-American fusion stuff is fun. I just wish that wasn’t all that was shown on recipe websites. I will say that I am surprised by kimchi’s success in the US, although the cynical part of me says its original popularity comes from a superiority complex of people who felt smug about trying “weird” foods and liking them.
I think one could expand this to how still, the white culture is considered “standard” or “normal” in the US. How white culture is claimed to be “no culture at all,” which accidentally reveals how much other cultures are still fetishized or seen as abnormal.
If you really feel the need to “educate” yourself on Korean food, Korea Garden, Nak Won Garden, Green Pepper are all restaurants in Pittsburgh that serve “real” Korean food without any of the modern twists or Korean-American fusions. Soju and COBRA are both popular and well liked takes on Korean food, the former being fusion and the latter being the Korean barbecue that has been a craze amongst teens.
But more than a single person’s food palate, what really needs to change is the sentiment of what a “normal” American meal looks like. When will we be able to break out of the constant feeling that non-white cuisine is less than or even different from American foods? Isn’t the whole point that our combined culture makes America?