On Asian Food Movies

Which is the real modern Royal Chef?

Warren Tom, my fellow Asian Art Museum volunteer, has a theory: Food is the fourth religion of China.  It's Warren who suggested my study of the packaging of Asia by Gourmet magazine for WASPs like me would be incomplete without including  popular films featuring Asian food.  He even gave me a list of must-sees, which leaned heavily towards the work of Wayne Wang, featuring San Francisco's Chinatown.

I needed a break from book proposal crafting and historical research, so I'm on it.  I've learned so much!  It's not just the Chinese who worship food.  Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam,  all make films in which food has a starring role.   (You can catch most of them on Netflix or Amazon Prime.)  I'm going to write about them, in no particular order, musing about food and what seems to this old white girl to be their cultural content, and asking questions.  I will discuss the plot, so you probably should watch before reading further!

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I'm crazy about Le Grand Chef (Hangul: 식객; Hanja: 食客; RR: Sikgaek), the 2007 film from South Korea.  Here's the set-up:  A Japanese, Fujiwara, wishes to return the knife of the last Korean Royal Chef to its rightful owner.  Durring the Japanese occupation of Korea, his father, a Japanese officer,  had witnessed the last Korean Royal Chef cut off his hand to avoid cooking for the conquerors.  The son wants to atone by retuning the knife.  (As it turns out, this Korean-Japanese tension will boil up at the movie's end.)

     

But how determine the rightful heir to the knife?  Ah hah!  A cooking contest, of course!  One of the contenders, Bong-Jo, owns a restaurant which is a remnant of the Joseon Dynasty cooking traditions, Woonam-Jung (Old Stone Bowl). Bong-Jo has dreams of franchises.  The other, Sung-chan, is an itinerant produce seller, caring for his senile grandfather on a small farm. Bong-jo and Sung-chan are one-time rivals, grandsons to former assistants to the Royal Chef.  (They are shown above, standing in front of crocks of fermenting kimchi. )

     

The contest reveals beautiful and intriguing dishes, a celebration of  Korean food.  Two of these, golden blowfish and Korean beef, will have a special role.  The blowfish turns out to have been the source of Sung-chan's dropping his apprenticeship at Woonam-Jung.  In the end, Sung-chan will sacrifice his pet cow to produce perfectly butchered beef, and the contest-winning beef soup, the one cooked for the last Choseon Emperor.  His cow goes peacefully to the slaughter, which is shown un-apologetically in the film, reminding me of the Chinese sacrifices to ancestors.  In contrast, Bong-jo's steer is badly handled and its meat hemorrhages, setting up the final round, the beef soup that made the deposed Emperor cry.

    

Little bites of history intrigue the viewer:

*The Choseon Dynasty kept hawks to catch pheasants.

*Taro root was sometimes called herring.

*In cooking films, the camera alternates between the shoulders and face of the actor and the hands of stand-in professional chef.

*Charcoal is a key ingredient in classic Korean cooking.  (This interested me because of the fuel shortage evident in China which made the discovery of coal in the Han Dynasty a boon.) 

*Korean country-cook stoves resemble the little Han ming-chi stove in the Asian's collection.  

*Charcoal burners are lonely the world over.

*As he sells his produce, Sung-chan dispenses nuggets of "food as medicine," so familiar in ancient Chinese writing on food.

 Not all is taken seriously:

*The judges are over-the-top in their descriptions of tastes.

*Instant ramen, maybe because it was a Japanese invention?

*A fight breaks out among the beef carcasses.

When he tastes Yuk-ae-jang, the beef soup Sung-Chan makes according to his grandfather's recipe, the Japanese Fujiwara announces:

"Now I understand why King Soon-jong was moved to tears.

The beef soup contains every aspect of Korea.

The long serving cow is Korea’s grass-roots democracy.

The hot-pepper oil is Korea’s hot and lively spirit…

The taro roots represent a nation that does not submit to foreign power.

The bracken is the vigorous life that spreads like wild grass.

What the Royal Chef cooked for the King was not just simply beef soup.

To the king who had lost his crown, he demonstrated that Korea’s spirit will live on.

The king could read his chef’s heart. And that’s why he cried."

Bong-jo thinks he's discovered the secret beef soup recipe, but it is really a Japanese recipe given to his grandfather by the occupying general.

Fujiwara explains:

"It's delicious but it's not something the Royal Chef would have made.

Using fried bean curd and soy sauce is a Japanese tradition, not Korean.

I'm actually stunned. This tastes exactly like a soup that's been in our family for generations.  It's as if my mom came to life and made it for me.  I don't know how you learned to make it but whoever gave you the recipe, probably didn't want it to be revealed because it is a soup with both Korean and Japanese origins."

Gasp!  

Sung-Chan is wins the knife.

     

Lest you think this is all just cinematic diversion, let me point you to Anders Riel Muller's comments on the situation of small farmers and food in South Korea.  With less than 8% of the population employed in the agriculture sector, 90% of its food is imported.  Only since the Asian financial crisis of 1997 have farmers and consumers sought the kind of alternatives seen in Sung-chan's produce truck.

Le Grand Chef  has given me an appetite for Korean food, and for Korean art and history, which thankfully, are next up in my Asian Art Museum training.

     Stay tuned for Le Grand Chef 2: Kimchi Battle!