bad metaphor

A Facebook comment from a friend inspired me to do a post about rice cakes, and hopefully, laziness notwithstanding, launch an entire series about Korean cuisine from the perspective of a foreigner trapped in a small town with very few options for other types of food. (Do you like dog meat and fish gut stew? Boy howdy, come on over!) I’ll start with rice cakes, though one might question why I am not starting with the most obvious choice of “kimchi.” Surely kimchi, the ubiquitous spicy-rotten cabbage served with every morsel of food consumed over the course of a Korean’s lifetime, ought to be the inaugural post. I’m starting with rice cakes because 1) like kimchi, they are a pretty big deal in Korean culinary culture and 2) I wanted to write about rice cakes and am too lazy to back track and also write about kimchi. So there! I’ll follow up with everyone’s favorite stinky cabbage next time.

The term “rice cake,” romanized in Korean to “tteok” or “ddeok” (according to the particular whim of whoever felt like transcribing it that day), is a little misleading. “Cake” would lead foreigners to think of a fluffy, sugary, cavity-inducing confection slathered in frosting or whipped cream. Append “rice” to the front, and in one stroke you’ve removed all the sugar and replaced it with density. Proper European style cakes can be hoovered up ones nostrils like the purest tracks of Colombian snow; try that same shit with the Korean version and you’ll be choking to death in a manner hilarious to bystanders.

According to the Wikipedia article I diligently skimmed while writing this post, there are hundreds of special types of “tteok/ddeok,” eaten on different occasions throughout the year. At New Year’s (both solar and lunar), Koreans eat rice cake soup for good luck. My co-teachers will sometimes bring in plates full of green tteok and white ddeok of varying shapes and sizes. There are little rice cake stores in my town that display those green and white standards, as well as pink ones with little white heart designs (Valentine rice cakes!) and ones coated in nut powder. The most popular Korean snack item, tteokbokki, is just plain rice cakes chopped up and coated in a fiery red pepper broth. I haven’t sampled all of these types, but quite a few of them out of curiosity, and I’ve come to the same conclusion my friend opined on Facebook: they all taste more or less the same, and they all taste like…drumroll please………..NOTHING.

Well, maybe not “nothing” to the extent that it is the same as if you had merely pretended to eat rice cake. No, the sensation is really that of being suffocated by having a pillow shoved down your windpipe and held there for a few minutes, until you can finally, mercifully chew enough to generate the requisite amount of saliva to ease the pillowy nothing-glop down into your esophagus, where acids will take over the painstaking task of deconstructing it. In some cases, maybe only on really special occasions, there will be a fleeting taste of burnt rice as you frantically masticate the glop-monster that threatens to become one with your gums.

The only rice cake I have tried so far that comes close to tasting of food is tteokbokki, but I hardly think that counts because you’re really just tasting the red pepper broth, and if you’re really into that broth, why not just eat it straight as a soup, and bypass the cakes? Perhaps it’s because I’m a lazy American and we’re not really so much into strenuous exercise or any movement at all, but I find the endless chewing to be a tedious effort with not much pay-off.

Though I haven’t noticed much of a variation in flavor or quality amongst any color of rice cakes, I did have a “rice cake” that really stood out in appearance and flavor, not long after I arrived. One of the friendly English-speaking part time interns at my school motioned for me to come over to a table in the teacher’s room. She had this huge grin on her face, and announced “I have brought some home-made rice-cakes. Come and try some!” She tore off a piece of what looked like the mess at the bottom of a pan of scorched, overcooked rice, and handed it to me. I said “kamsa hamnida” and nibbled at it. Yep, burnt rice mistake. At first I thought it was some sort of self-deprecating joke she was inflicting on everyone else, like “oh look at how incompetent I am in the kitchen! no really!” Nope, she was beaming as everyone else happily chowed down on crap my mama would whoop my ass for making on accident.

My verdict on Korean rice cakes: “meh.” They’re far from the most offensive things I’ve put in my mouth (heyyo!), but I’m baffled by the reverence and adoration Koreans bestow upon these little chewy bland carb-fests. To be sure, I did arrive in Korea after Chuseok and therefore haven’t tried songpyeon, a type of rice cake that supposedly has stuff inside that isn’t red pepper paste. So perhaps I will change my tune come next September. Still, I’m doubting I’ll like it better than the Viet equivalents, which include banh chung (which I missed a lot this new year’s :( ) and moon cakes and that one type of moon cake that is more jelly-like on the outside but I forget what it’s called…dammit, why didn’t I just teach in Vietnam this year?