Bookish Gardener

Incredible edible

In the modest 48-square-feet-plus-whiskey-barrel allocated to edibles in my garden, form often trumps function in the things I grow to eat: lemon cucumbers, red okra, scarlet runner beans (two varieties), rainbow Swiss chard, Chinese long beans, Green Zebra tomatoes, purple-black Diamond eggplant, Jimmy Nardello's red sweet chili pepper, a collection of herbes de Provence + herbs of "Scarborough Fair", and the 6-foot endive that looks like a big weedy mistake for all but the first hours of the morning, when it blooms with the blue that I cannot live without.

I've purposely stocked my vegetable beds with ornamental edibles, but the balloon flowers in my perennial back border are a surprising edible ornamental, as it turns out. Platycodon (platy, the prefix, meaning "broad", and codon, the suffix, meaning "bells": thank you, Dictionary of Botanical Epithets!) grandiflorum's an invaluable garden citizen. It blooms tall and long, and the blue velvet texture of the specimen in the photo above (looks much better "in person", trust me) is a knockout against bright pink phlox or lemon yellow daylilies.

Platycodon is doraji in Korean, celebrated in folk song. What's edible is not above-ground, but below: the fleshy taproots (pictured here, if you scroll down some) are peeled, soaked, julienned and spiced, and eaten as banchan. It's crunchy and very yummy; I'd been eating it for years and years before finally cluing into its floral connection.

I'd never sacrifice the balloon flowers in my garden just to get to their roots, but they're prompting a summer day's fantasy: a platycodon farm, with acres planted to billowing fields of the broad bells, in blue, pink and white. Mmmm.

Happy Hangul Day

King Sejong.

Today is Hangul Day in Korea, which commemorates King Sejong's creation of the Korean phonetic alphabet. This terrific post from Language Log tells us why this is a big deal. During his thirty-two year reign and before his death at age fifty-two, Sejong (one of my political heroes) also composed epic poetry, invented the pluviometer (rain gauge), and created a musical notation system for Korean court music. This 얌전한 아주머니 can't quite bring herself to put her lips to a glass of 막걸리 (makkeolli) in honor of the occasion, but the makkeolli-McCawley association suggested by Language Log is apt and brilliant.

Chuseok

Chuseok began on Saturday, the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, and the final day of this holiday, which is sometimes analogized to a Korean Thanksgiving, is today. I'm no expert on this, mind you. My memories of the three years I spent in Korea as a child are rich and intense, but I don't remember celebrating Chuseok at all. After having recently read up on it some, my impression is that this is a holiday for extended families to get together, pay homage to ancestors by visiting their gravesites, enjoy special foods, and exchange gifts. Highways are said to be jammed with traffic as travelers go home for the holidays, leaving the capital city of Seoul a virtual ghost town. I'm curious about this tradition and whether it grew as a cultural phenomenon only after I left Korea in the early seventies...or maybe it was always celebrated with this importance by others, but not observed in the same way by our own family (for good reasons: the ancestral gravesites for the generations preceding my grandparents would have been north of the 38th parallel; we had three generations under one roof with the rest of the family mostly within the same city, so there would have been no need to travel to get together; and back then, most folks traveled by foot, bus, train or, occasionally, taxicab, and private autos were unusual for even the middle class).

I grew up on Korean food (so much so that it is a problem when I don't get my Recommended Daily Allowance of garlic), but don't seek it out in restaurants too much. It's a problem having had a grandmother, mother and aunts with extraordinary cooking skills. (Imagine making your own soy sauce for the year from scratch.) And although the entire Korean peninsula is only about the size of the state of Minnesota, there are noticeable differences in dialects from region to region, with similarly striking differences in cooking methods and seasonings as you move south down the Korean peninsula. Of course, all this has intimidated me from cooking Korean at home, which I need to change if I don't want to wake up with a big bowl of regret when I'm the last generation standing.

When I want to evoke Korea, I take a leaf of perilla (dul-ggae in Korean and shiso in Japanese) and, now that the perilla has flowered, a stem of the flowering stalk as it is forming seeds, and rub them to release the scent. It's an indescribable mix of mint, musk and basil...sort of. The leaves (which I used to think were grape leaves, that is, before I became a gardener), slaked in vegetable oil, are often served a condiment on the Korean dinner table. Maybe for dinner tonight, bul go gi (which I rarely order when I do go to Korean restaurants: it's tourist food, not home cooking!...but when seasoned properly, it's killer as carpaccio), which everyone will enjoy, and kaji namul (eggplant "side dish"), which I'm sure I'll have all to myself. And I'll telephone my mom, and wish her a happy Chuseok, for the first time ever.

 

Kamsa hamnida...

...that is, "thank you," to Mixolydian Mode for the Weeping Willow Tree Taryong (to play the midi, click the post title at the link). I think we're going to have to make this the theme song for Willoughby.

Bongsunghwa nail dye

I'd been looking forward to doing this for many months: dyeing the fingernails of my daughters' pinky and ring fingers with bongsunghwa (Impatiens balsamina). (I don't know why the tradition is to do only a few fingers instead of all the fingers, but I do recall that it is simply "not done" to dye the forefinger.) I took a handful of blossoms from my profusely flowering balsam ('Blackberry Trifle'), crushed them into a paste with some alum (how much alum? I'd say "to taste"—only in the sense of adding a pinch or more until the mixture feels like it has the right consistency—a total guesstimate, in other words), placed a bit of the paste on the fingernail, wrapped the finger with a grape leaf (foraged from the wild and weedy border of our neighborhood schoolyard), and secured the leaf wrap with a strip of nylon stocking. I was hoping that the stocking fabric would have more "give" than string, but the girls started complaining within hours about the wraps being too tight, so I loosened them a bit (and so, in the course of the night, some stayed on, and some fell off). In the morning, we unwrapped the fingers, and were delighted to find that the dye had "took". The balsam blossom we used is lavender-colored and produced a deep purple paste, but dyed orange, in pretty much the color I remember from my childhood (although not as deep an orange as it would have been if we'd included tobacco as an additive, and if the girls would have endured a night's discomfort to keep the wraps on tightly all night!). The dye on the skin of the fingers will wear off in a few days, but the nail dye will stay until the nail grows out.

Korea in Flower

When the summer rolled in, the white cabbage flowers were long gone. So was the white butterfly. All around us, the summer burst with colors and perfume. In our flower bed bloomed marvels-of-Peru, rose mosses, yellow ox eyes, cockscombs, touch-me-nots and roses. The steaming brown soil in the flower bed choked the air and earthworms turned constantly beneath the rotting balsam roots.

This passage, from Mia Yun's House of the Winds, is more than poetic to me. It feels like the Korea I knew for three years as a child. My maternal grandparents' house on the westside outskirts of Seoul had a plot in front farmed for food for the family, where we kids planted beans and corn, and the grownups planted rows and rows of cabbages for kimchi, leaf lettuces, squash, melons, and eggplant. No indoor plumbing, and I still remember the day that the hand-cranked rope-and-pail well was replaced with a manual pump. We took for granted that we'd be able to walk down any street and find red salvia growing, and figured out without being taught how to pluck the nectar-bearing buds from the salvia to sample the sweetness for ourselves. No lawns; just plants and flowers, everywhere.

The writing in this book is emotional and direct. The childhood memories woven into the novel are retold slow-motion, frame-by-frame. It looks like the author and I are roughly contemporaries in age (she's about three years older), and I'm sure that a lot of what I get out of this novel is the resonance of similar childhood experiences that I never thought I'd get to read about in English:

One evening, braving a heavy rain, sister went to a neighbor's fence to pick pumpkin leaves. (We used the leaves to wrap our fingers for balsam dye. Mother added crystal pieces of alum and tobacco to the crushed balsam petals and leaves. They gave our nails that deep red dye we coveted but they also made our fingers throb all night!)

Maybe we'll try this out with my girls this summer using Impatiens balsam 'Blackberry Trifle', if it works with alum powder (instead of crystals) and without the tobacco. (Their fingers won't throb if the leaves aren't tied on too tightly—I promise.)

But you don't have to have had the same memories of a childhood in Korea in order to appreciate a description like this:

Mother's favorite, though, was the moonflower. Moonflowers bloomed at the end of a long, heat-hushed afternoon, when dusk came softly and swiftly, steadily dripping persimmon red and azalea pink over the tiled rooftops. They were as big as Korean bronze gongs and lush as white satin. But later, when the sky turned into a huge dark blue dome, they became pale, blue-tinged porcelain. It was the loneliest flower in the world. Floating alone into the night mist.

In my garden, I'm already seeing the tiny seedlings of self-sown "rose mosses" (portulaca), and my harabeoji's (grandfather's) favorite, hollyhocks, will be overrepresented in the west side patio bed—alcea nigra, alcea ficifolia, and althaea (I like to think of it as the Castilian "alcea") rosea. And in the shrub border surrounding this bed, I've planted a new rose of sharon (Hibiscus syriacus), also known as the mugunghwa—the national flower of Korea.

Mia Yun, House of the Winds. Penguin Books, 1998. ISBN 0 14 02 9194 6 (paperback).

Yeobo, manhi meokja

(Very) rough Korean-to-English translation of the post title: "[Spousal term of endearment], Let's Eat (a lot)". I've been following the amazing adventures of the blogger known only as "FatMan" on his FatMan Seoul blog, as he eats his way through Seoul's cuisine, be it sit-down, take-out or off the street cart. It's all good. But beware...the verbal and visual descriptions are graphic...do not read on an empty stomach! My new morning routine: sit down, groggily wait for the coffee to brew, think "let's see what FatMan's eating today". Read mouth-watering post. Realize I'm starving and now craving something I can't exactly whip up in the kitchen in the next few minutes. D'oh! Vow never to read FatMan Seoul on an empty stomach again. Next morning. Sit down, groggily wait for the coffee to brew...[etc.]...D'oh! Rinse. Repeat. Even if Korean food isn't your cup of cha, do take a look—FatMan is irresistible.