Living near one of the great Korea towns of the United States here in Los Angeles
I have learned to love a lot of Korean food but I must admit I had never even heard of today's dish hwajeon,
a rice pancake with fresh flowers using a recipe from 1670.
We'll also look at the incredible life of the recipes author Jang Gye-hyang.
17th century hwajeon this time on Tasting History.
So today's episode is brought to you by my Patreon patrons.
They have been so incredibly supportive since I made the decision to leave Disney and follow Tasting History full time
so thank you so, so much to them. Also they've been helping me test recipes for the cookbook that I
am working on which will be out like next year.
Anyway I could not do this without their support so thank you to them.
Also thank you to my friend Rich for helping me with Korean.
Today's recipe comes from the 17th century Korean cookbook Eumsikidimibang.
It's considered the first or sometimes the second cookbook from Asia written by a woman.
It's also the first cookbook written in Hangeul rather than the more traditional Chinese characters of the time.
"Hwajeon: petals of roses, dugyeonhwa petals or peonies
are mixed with glutinous rice flour and buckwheat flour and knead it with water.
They are fried in an oiled pan to make the edges crispy. Once they are slightly cooled serve spread with honey.
These little rice and flour cakes have been eaten since the Goryeo Dynasty during the spring
festival of Samjinnal the queen and princess were said to enjoy these while playing games.
And they're still eaten today mostly during the springtime including during Bucheonim or Buddha's birthday,
which this year is celebrated in South Korea tomorrow, and I didn't plan that it just
happened. It was a little happy accident. At least it's tomorrow if you're watching this the day that I post it.
But the modern version is a little bit different from what we're making today. First they
do not use buckwheat today and it makes them so they're nice sparkling white. Will get to buckwheat later on.
Also they don't usually put the flowers in the dough, they put them on top and it makes for a really pretty dish,
but as we are following a recipe from 1670 our dish will be pretty in a different way.
So what you'll need is: 1 1/2cups or 150 grams of glutinous rice flour,
one tablespoon buckwheat flour, or no buckwheat flour.
So I tried this many, many times. I started out with half
glutinous rice and half buckwheat flour. The dough would just fall apart. It would just crumble.
I kept lowering the buckwheat flour until I got to one tablespoon, and it worked but they don't
look very good and it didn't add to the flavor so I would just leave it out. Maybe the buckwheat
flour that they had was a little bit different or maybe it's just changed, I don't know,
but it didn't really work for me.
1/3 cup or 80 milliliters of hot water, a quarter cup fresh or dried flour petals.
Fresh petals definitely work best but seeing as I made like 30 of these
using different amounts of buckwheat and I ran out of fresh petals eventually and resorted mostly to
dried and they worked pretty much just as well.
1 teaspoon of oil. I used un-toasted sesame oil
but you'll actually get a better look if you use like a modern vegetable oil, it's up to you.
And one tablespoon of honey.
So first mix the flour petals into the rice flour.
If you're using buckwheat now is the time to mix that in as well. Then add your hot water and it
does need to be quite hot, not like scalding but quite quite hot or else it just doesn't work.
Also you may need a little bit more or a little bit less than the third cup, so feel it out you
want the dough to come together, but you don't want it like wet.
Then knead the dough for about 5 minutes until it's nice and smooth and divide it into eight pieces and form those into balls.
Then press those into little pancakes about two inches across, then add a little bit of oil to the pan.
Really depending on the size of your pan you might not even need all the oil. You just want it
kind of slick, you don't want like a layer of oil in there it's just to make it so they don't stick.
Heat that over high heat, and while that heats we'll take a closer look
at the book from which our recipe comes as well as the amazing woman who wrote it.
The Joseon Dynasty ruled Korea from 1392 all the way to either 1897 or 1910 depending on
how you calculate it. Either way, it's over a half millennia not too shabby,
and during that time society was broken into a very strict caste system. The top, of course being the royals but
right below that were the yangban and that is the class which our recipe's author Jang Gye-hyang was born into in 1598.
Her father had turned down a really high position in the government to follow
his calling of being a teacher though unlike many teachers today he was very well paid.
He actually built a school where he taught principles of Neo-Confucianism to very wealthy students.
Neo-Confucianism was all the rage during the Joseon dynasty.
Unfortunately one not great thing about Neo-Confusionism is that it excluded women from higher learning for the most part
and that was not good for Jang because she wanted to learn so instead she eavesdropped
on her father's classes and would sneak into his library and taught herself how to read and write.
I see a lot of myself in Jang Gye-hyang because my mother was also a teacher, English and Humanities,
and I too would sneak into her study and read through her books and look at mostly the pictures,
and most of the time actually I was just playing Lemonade Stand on her Apple II computer so maybe,
maybe I'm not just like Jang. She did not have an Apple II computer to distract her and instead
she learned how to read and write poetry.
At the age of nine she wrote a poem called 'Ode to the Saint.'
The saint being the wise scholars of the past and she laments not being able to meet them,
but rejoices in the fact that their writings have allowed her to glimpse into their psyche.
Even now or when she was living she did that at age nine.
What were you doing at age nine?
Throughout her teenage years she wrote several more poems, one of which was actually recognized by the king.
She also proved adept at embroidery and painting specifically tigers which was a
very popular subject in Korea at the time. She also became an excellent calligrapher.
She was unknowingly complimented by the master calligrapher Heomok when he said,
"The strokes are so powerful, setting itself apart from the calligraphy of most Koreans. I wonder if it was done by a Chinese master."
It was not. It was done by this lady.
So even though it wasn't typical for a woman to be educated in that way at the time
her father and his students couldn't help but be impressed
and it was one of those students that at age 19 she ended up marrying. Now we don't know a lot
about their relationship especially in the early years but we do know that they moved to a rather remote village called Dudeul which
there today even now is a sort of museum dedicated to her,
and I really, really want to go one of these days. They actually I guess make a lot of the foods from the cookbook
but it's remote even today, and I've never been to Korea in the first place so
we'll see, hopefully someday.
With her new husband she raised either nine or ten kids,
found conflicting numbers, but two of them were from his previous marriage, his wife had died.
But she was most known, most famous at the time for raising
seven sons which I believe was a movie named the seven sons, The Seventh- 'The Seventh Son.'
I never saw it probably wasn't very good.
But Zhang was good she was a very good mother.
Her third son ended up becoming a very well-known writer and wrote a lot about his upbringing, and things that she would say,
"Even if you receive great compliments from others for your writing
I would value the compliments more if they were about how kind you have been to others.'
Amen to that. That lady knew how to raise some kids
but perhaps her most impressive legacy actually comes in the aftermath
of an invasion of Korea by the Manchu led Qing Dynasty of China in 1636.
Militarily and politically it was a terrible time for Korea but it was also a terrible time domestically.
So it left a lot of people displaced and Zhang would welcome many of these people into her own home.
There was also a lot of starvation during the war and she planted acorn trees all around the village
so that there was some kind of food for for the most impoverished, and it's said
that in the evenings at dinner time she would look down the hill at the village and any houses that
didn't have smoke rising from their kitchens she would invite them up to eat at her home, which is pretty awesome.
She said, "It is the order of the universe to live together.
The highest order of moral law is sharing his or her own wealth with less fortunate people.
I mean the woman was a saint. She spent her life wealthy and privileged yes, but she never kept herself isolated.
She let other people in and other parts of society in. Was not very common at the time and you
can even see this in her cookbook.
It's thought that she wrote Eumsikidimibang around 1670 in her early 70s.
She actually complains in the book about her waning eyesight and how it makes it hard to write.
It was written just for her family. It was probably for the wives of all of her seven sons
who you know needed to learn how to feed her kids, but through the 146 recipes in the book
you get a glimpse of these two Koreas.
The majority of the recipes belong to Joseonwangjo Gunghungyori,
or The Cuisine of the Royal Korean Court
but 16 of the recipes are called Matjilbangmun
and they are recipes from a village, more common everyday recipes.
t's actually from the village where her mother grew up, so it would be like having a cookbook full of you know really
fancy foods that would sous-vide and you know where you add a little bit of smoke to make it
really nice, almost French accent, but then also have a few recipes for hamburgers, and PB & J.
Over a third of the recipes are for alcoholic drinks, another feather in her cap in my opinion
and it also includes one of the very first recipes for something called Gwahaju which is a fortified rice wine,
which I think I should make here on the channel.
There are also recipes for storing foods like eggplant and peaches,
as well as recipes featuring ingredients like pheasant, dog, abalone, and sea cucumber.
One ingredient that does not appear is chili pepper even though several varieties
had been introduced to Korea earlier on in the century.
The more mild now called Korean chili pepper that's still used today,
and a much spicier pepper called Nammancho which they seem
to feel about the same way as I do about spicy peppers.
"Nammancho has a strong poison. A tavern sold it along with soju and many people lost their lives after consuming it."
I absolutely believe it.
Instead they spice their foods with things like ginger and mustard, black pepper and Cheoncho,
or szechuan pepper which despite the name is not related to either black pepper, or like spicy red peppers.
It's really confusing.
Now even if the new world chili peppers were available in her little village at the time,
I don't know that they were, but you know she didn't include them in the book,
but I think another reason that she didn't include them in the book might be because
the recipes are kind of a way of preserving her family's history, her lineage and I just- I love that
because I mean I guess that's kind of what this show is all about, preserving history through through recipes and old foods
and everything like that so thank you for for doing that.
You know if she was watching this right now I would thank her for doing that because it really makes-
I just love it. Anyway let's taste a little bit of her family history as we fry up our hwajeon.
So once the oil is nice and hot turn the heat to medium-low and put the hwajeon in the pan.
You'll fry them until they just start to crisp around the edges which is about two minutes on one side,
then flip them and fry for another minute or two on the other. Then set them aside to cool
for just a couple minutes before drizzling them with honey and here we are 17th century hwajeon.
Here we go. They're really pretty. I don't even know if you can like get all the flecks of flour in it.
The one thing is the modern version is purely white, like pearl white and it's really,
really pretty. Because of the the little bit of buckwheat and I think also because of the
oil these darken up a little bit more. They're still beautiful. Also they have yellow flowers
in them so that probably gives off a little color. They're still lovely. Give it a shot.
They're very sticky. Not as sticky as the Chinese cake that we did a couple months ago, but
still that glutenous sticky rice but I think because it's thinner and because of the way that
it's cooked it has a little crispiness to it too. So it's crispy and chewy at the same time which
is actually kind of fun. The flavor, the honey is there you know. You get that sweetness from
the honey but you really get the floral. Whatever flowers you know I used. I actually ended up using
a few marigolds and whatever I had because I used everything else up but you get a little bit of that.
I think that if you use something like fresh rose petals that's really going to come through,
or fresh flowers in general probably. I used a little bit of fresh in here, I still had some.
They're really, really nice. I don't think you would need a lot.
You know one of these and like a cup of tea would be would be really lovely,
but it's just a very kind of light floral spring treat,
and I think you should make them. Either these or make the modern version.
They're gorgeous. I'm sure they taste excellent as well. If you make either version
make sure to share the images with me on Instagram or Twitter, I love that. I'll put my handles down here,
and in the description, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.