The Recipe - Not Your Ordinary Korean Food Movie

   

The non-supernatural ingredients for Doenjong jjigea.

The first time I watched The Recipe I thought it was just an ode to a much loved local food, as Tampopo is to noodles, or Jiro Dreams of Sushi to freshly caught fish. In the final scene, the journalist Chio sums up the recipe for the transcendent doenjong  jjigea: 

The ingredients of the doenjiang
That Kim Jong-gu missed in his last moments:
Crocks made of clay saturated with ume blossoms,
Salt dried only in sunlight and then drained of seawater over time,
Soybeans grown by baby pigs,
Lacquer Tree Spring water from a deep forest.
Yeast. Ume wine yeast.
Rice stalks. Resonance created by crickets.
Sunshine, wind and tears.
Method for making. You wait.

This recipe was enough to set me searching Manhattan for the proper restaurant to try it.  It was sort of a silly idea on a sweltering June day, as this is the kind of stew you want in a cold Korean winter.  No matter, a sudden downpour left me drenched and shivering and I found the right place not far from Penn Station.  Quite honestly, this was the first time I'd eaten Korean food.  Now I'm wondering how I survived without kimchi and her pickled sisters.
   
But back to The Recipe.  This is a contemporary Korean film.  I don't speak Korean, but I'm enough of a linguist to hear some fun things happening with urban dialects.  Besides loving shots of farmland and forest, which are rapidly being gobbled up by high-rise apartment buildings, there is the expected cut at Japan.  The hero's Japanese grandfather wants him to come home to an arranged marriage, tricks him into leaving Korea, and unwittingly causes his death by blocking his return.
   
The second time I watched The Recipe, I realized that the narrative depends on folkloric devices.  One of the most famous tales of star-crossed lovers in China, Japan and Korea is that of the Weaver and the Cowherd.  Separated by fate, they are the stars Vega and Altair.  Only on the seventh day of the seventh month,  can they cross the Milky Way and be briefly re-united.  In Korea, the festival to celebrate this is called Chilseok.  In The Recipe Chio finds and interrogates the hero, Goblin boy, on the night of a village festival, and learns how the two were separated.
   
When Chio tries to find him again, he realizes he had seem a ghost, much as in the American folkloric trope, the Hitchhiker.  The plot is more complicated than Le Grand Chef I and II.  What they share is idealization of pure ingredients and cooking from the heart.