I took the news badly when my friend Jiwon said she was leaving New York and moving to Seoul. She was a beloved drinking and dining companion, a doting cat sitter and the person most likely to make me laugh until I cried. But she wanted to get to know the country where she was born, and she assured me it wouldn’t be forever.
True to her word, Jiwon returned after three years. What made her time in Korea tolerable to me were the evocative dispatches she emailed regularly (she’s a poet). She joined a hiking club and recounted what happened after a long day’s walk, when the hikers would repair to a cabin and talk until late, over formidable quantities of soju — the popular Korean spirit often distilled from rice.
Those emails introduced me to soju, but I wouldn’t actually taste it until years later, at a restaurant in New York. It’s modest in flavor, nothing fancy, and perfect with a spread of stomach- and soul-satisfying Korean cooking. On that occasion, I also triedmakgeolli (a cloudy, unfiltered fermented spirit, generally made from rice, wheat and water), which appeared at the table in plastic bottles. Its faint, earthy funkiness reminded me of certain ciders I love.
I recently invited Jiwon over for dinner and a variety of Korean drinks: soju, makgeolli, baekseju (a fermented rice drink infused with ginseng and other herbs), plum wine, raspberry wine and beer. The writer Alexander Chee, who spent part of his childhood in Seoul, joined us. At his suggestion, we kicked things off withsomaek — Korean boilermakers, which Alex described as “beer stiffened with a shot of soju you hit with a spoon,” and which were just right with snacks of dried squid and Jiwon’s homemade dumplings. Then, while we ate spicy pork stew, short ribs and kimchi, we emptied bottles of makgeolliand soju, one after another. (Among the latter, favorites included the slightly sweeter HiteJinro’s Chamisul Classic and Lotte’s mellow Chum-Churum.)
You can find creative cocktails made with soju in many Korean restaurants: Its relative neutrality and low alcohol content (compared with, say, vodka’s) make it friendly for mixing, as does its generally low price. With citrus syrup and tonic, it becomes an easy, pleasing highball. But Jiwon’s preference is to drink it on its own — as cold as possible, in small glasses — or simply infused (as in her recipe, with blueberry and basil). Cocktails seemed at odds with the cozy feeling of the gathering; the time that might have been spent making them was put to better use talking. As dinner wound down and we moved on to wine, I took down my copy of “The Three Way Tavern,” a collection of poems by the contemporary Korean poet Ko Un, and passed it around. From the title poem:
There can be no sadness,
said the rainy road
when I looked out after three drinks
After more than three, I felt no sadness. Instead, a just-right fullness, from the food, the drink, the poems, the pleasure of a few companionable hours. It felt as close to being in a cabin in the mountains, after a hike, as I’ve ever felt at my kitchen table.
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