By GI Korea on May 24th, 2011 at 6:09 pm

A Video Overview of Budaejjigae (부대찌개)

• Geek Ken
  9:39 pm on May 24th, 2011 1

  Just to quickly add a note. If folks are looking for some recipes/videos for korean food using (mostly) north american sources of produce, check out Maanngchi. I love her stuff. Mostly as it’s learning from a regular person about korean cooking. http://www.maangchi.com/

• Teadrinker
  1:26 am on May 25th, 2011 2

  Best junkfood ever invented, as far as I’m concerned.

• Jeffrey Miller
  3:02 am on May 25th, 2011 3

  Korea’s first fusion food.

• Leon LaPorte
  5:21 am on May 25th, 2011 4

  Wonderbar!

• John
  1:38 pm on May 25th, 2011 5

  If you only knew the origin of Army Base Soup, you’d cry.

  I hear it started when Korean refugees during Korean War would pick out half-eaten cans of spam/etc from trash dump of US army camps and put them together to make a soup. Yes, a dish created with ingredients picked out from a trash dump…

• Teadrinker
  3:25 pm on May 25th, 2011 6

  My comments seems to have been eaten up by the automatic censor for no reason that I can discern…So here goes again…

  John,

  It’s just as likely that the ingredients were stolen. Never heard of slicky boys, the infamous civilian scroungers and thieves who’d take anything that wasn’t tied down during and after the Korean War on military bases? I read somewhere that the expression gave birth to a Korean expression often used for rubbish, 쓰레기. That maybe be why the origin of the ingredients gets cloudy.

• Teadrinker
  3:26 pm on May 25th, 2011 7

  Yup, and I replace it with a text filled with typos.

• Orbit
  5:51 pm on May 25th, 2011 8

  it tastes better than it looks

• Tom
  4:18 am on May 26th, 2011 9

  #6, just look at the condescending comments about our parents and grandparents who were trying to survive… out of an innocent subject. And you wonder why Tom is not so high on ESL people.

• Leon LaPorte
  4:30 am on May 26th, 2011 10

  I’d say it’s a mix of both. I’ve had Koreans tell me people pick through trash for some ingredients while others said it was outright stolen from the installation. In short:

  YES! There were starving people digging in US garbage bins
  &
  YES! There were slicky boys stealing from the fat bastards on post (and/or making other illicit deals with shady supply sergeants)

  Both exemplify Korean ingenuity in the face of adversity. I’m sure some soup had both pilfered AND salvaged items intermingling in the same pot.

  Regardless, I like the budae in my chigae. I probably eat almost once a week.

  /The victim card is too often played, methinks

• John
  10:11 am on May 26th, 2011 11

  #6
  Yes, the ingredients were stolen and picked from trash yard of US armed forces installations. Surely many GI’s threw away lots of uneaten food.

  It was a desperate time for Koreans for sure. At least they weren’t rioting and pointing fingers at US or SK govt for not feeding them.

  Either way, the origin of the dish makes me sad.

• archieb
  2:44 pm on May 26th, 2011 12

  9-Now that South Korea has a flourishing economy there’s no more black market for anything for sale on US military posts, right? RIGHT?

• Tom
  3:05 pm on May 26th, 2011 13

  #12, that’s just crooked GI’s doing all the work. USFK is very corrupt.

• Leon LaPorte
  4:36 pm on May 26th, 2011 14

  #13 Tommy boy, a dose of reality would likely cause you to go into spasms.

• Steve Austin
  5:48 pm on May 26th, 2011 15

  #13- Ever seen who runs the black market? Looks like an adjumma racket to me.

• Tom
  5:53 pm on May 26th, 2011 16

  #15, she’s just making an honest living. It’s the GI’s who are making a profit by stealing. That’s the reality, waegukin.

• Leon LaPorte
  6:12 pm on May 26th, 2011 17

  Funny, I’ve never seen a GI with a shopping cart full of oxtails, spare ribs, spam, cheese, hotdogs, DHEA, vitamins and baby formula though I’d see adjima every day, sometimes multiple times a day. USFK finally figured out how to crack down on that, at least on the surface.

• Tom
  6:18 pm on May 26th, 2011 18

  #17, don’t be silly, we can find all those products in any of the Korean stores. Why would any Korean try to blackmarket those stuff when they are all plentiful?

• Leon LaPorte
  6:40 pm on May 26th, 2011 19

  This was not always the case. Either they were unavailable OR they were in facts items which found their way to the store via the black market. In any case they were and still are cheaper on base. Of course if you lived here you would know that.

• Leon LaPorte
  6:42 pm on May 26th, 2011 20

  Who knew a thread on budaejjigae would be so controversial?

• Tom
  7:09 pm on May 26th, 2011 21

  #19, spam, cheese, baby formula, unavailable in Korea? Waekukins are funny.

• Leon LaPorte
  8:03 pm on May 26th, 2011 22

  #21, They are cheaper on post. Get it. As in less money. Of course you wouldn’t know, seeing as how you abandoned your precious Corea long ago to live the life of the waegook.

• tellos
  9:35 am on May 30th, 2011 23

  #3 Since red pepper was brought by Portuguese to Korea (maybe trough Japan I’m not sure), it’s not the first fusion food.

  And even before pepper, people were already fusioning stuff, that’s the beauty of cooking!

• kushibo
  11:32 am on May 30th, 2011 24

  Jeffrey Miller wrote:
  

  Korea’s first fusion food.

  Ha ha! Great marketing slogan if the Pudae Tchigae Association ever needs one.

  Leon LaPorte wrote:
  

  Funny, I’ve never seen a GI with a shopping cart full of oxtails, spare ribs, spam, cheese, hotdogs, DHEA, vitamins and baby formula though I’d see adjima every day, sometimes multiple times a day. USFK finally figured out how to crack down on that, at least on the surface.

  Maybe not, but I’ve seen many a GI drive a carload of said items that they’re spouse gathered together over to the blackmarket dropoff where they collected the cash for the items.

  My ex-fiancée’s mother ran such an operation, in Hannam-dong. It was horribly embarrassing to my ex, who didn’t tell me for a couple years what her parents actually did for money (her father owns ginseng farmland in the Ch’ungch’ŏng region, so it provided cover), but eventually I learned, as the “warehouse” was in the basement of their Hannam-dong place, where we would hang out and play go-stop many nights. I saw lots of different GIs waiting in the cars as their wife transacted and brought in a whole bunch of cash. That’s why I’m annoyed by these one-sided depictions of Korean ajummas being behind this when their GI husbands knew and were willing participants.

• kushibo
  11:45 am on May 30th, 2011 25

  As for the origins stories, I’ve heard the lot of them, especially the half-eaten food taken out of the garbage dump. The “stolen from the base” theories pop up from time to time, but I give more credence to what I’ve heard from long-timers who were in Korea during and immediately after the war, where garbage was stolen, and the other ingredients were obtained through black-market conduits, with the help of GIs trying to make a buck.

  I’m not going to begrudge anyone — a starving Korean during the war or a GI during the war who was always in fear of being shot at — for trying to make due during that time. In the end, the stories of this food’s creation are, as John suggests, a sad reminder of that time. In fact, much of the appeal of this food that was behind its resurgence in the 1990s and early 2000s was this nostalgia for that time of lost innocence.

• ChickenHead
  12:37 pm on May 30th, 2011 26

  “That’s why I’m annoyed by these one-sided depictions of Korean ajummas being behind this when their GI husbands knew and were willing participants.”

  Think a lower enlisted guy with a Korean wife getting leaned on to make an extra buck off the black market is bad?

  Guess what happens when they let a colonel with a Korean wife be in charge of contracting or club off-limits.

  And, for some strange reason, USFK never seems to notice.

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