Diane and I need your help: what exactly is 술 안주, or sul anju?
For those of you who aren’t Korean, or have never gotten drunk with Koreans, sul anju is a catch-all phrase describing the food one eats while drinking alcohol. Koreans think drinking on an empty stomach is bad for you, though they’re not too worried about the quantity of the booze itself. So whether you’re drinking a bottle of soju with dinner (the first stage), or going on to drink more at the next establishment (the second stage), you’ll always have something to eat on the table and usually something more substantial than peanuts.
This much, we know. But what’s a little tricky for us is that the foods Koreans might consider sul anju aren’t limited to the kind of food we in the U.S. think of as bar snacks. Typical anju includes things like dried squid; 전, jeon, or savory pancakes; and a platter of tofu topped high with spicy pork and kimchi. But you can even consider all the meat you eat from the grill anju if you’re drinking while you eat. It seems like you can’t really say there are foods that are only for eating with alcohol. At the least, it seems pretty clear that sul anju never includes shiksa, the rice and soup/stew that’s served at the end of the meal.
The issue of what constitutes sul anju is the kind of thing Diane and I thought we knew until we got down to the business of defining it for the cookbook. We had asked her friend Eunhee to recommend a good place to eat and drink, and even though it was some of the best food we had in Seoul, the meal left us more befuddled than anything.
She took us to a place called 행락원, or Haengnagwhun, in the Nonhyundong neighborhood south of the river. Her friends had told her what we had to try: raw blue crabs marinated in a spicy sauce; a cold dish of buckwheat jelly tossed with buckwheat sprouts (similar to what we later ate in Bongpyeong), and a clear stew flavored with fish roe. And since the goal was to drink as well as to eat, we got a bottle of 매취순, maechisun, or wine made out of maesil plums (the same as Japanese ume plums).
I’ll leave the wine description to Diane, but I was amazed by the freshness and sharpness of everything we ate. It was the first time I’d tried memilssak-mukmuchim, the buckwheat salad. When muk, the firm jelly, is made out of buckwheat instead of mung beans or acorns, it has a much smoother, more tender texture, more like cheese than jello. The sprouts were the perfect crisp counterpoint, as were the vinegary dressing and the fragrant sesame oil.
The blue crabs were served with a side of yellow fish roe and plenty of lettuce. It was salty but refreshing, the way raw seafood is when it’s super-fresh. It went well with our drinks, but it also went so well on top of rice, it’s what made me begin to wonder, “What makes this anju?”
The fish roe stew was definitely not anju, since it was in the “dinner” section of the menu. The proper thing would probably have been to order it with a couple of bowls of rice after we had finished eating the other dishes as our anju, but it was so good, I didn’t mind having it with us longer. It had that clean, clear flavor of good seafood-based broths, stuffed full of zucchini and 팽이, paengi (or enoki) mushrooms.
So what do you think? What part of our meal would you consider sul anju? What’s your favorite thing to eat as sul anju? I have a feeling it really doesn’t matter though, that the point might be less than to define the food you eat while you’re drinking as to be drinking while you’re eating.
One Fork, One Spoon 