About

The cook, the notepad, the book

Miyeong Jeon 전미영

For the past twenty years Miyeong has cooked a long way from where she grew up. She cooks the way most people actually cook: the same forty dishes on rotation, plus whatever looked good at the market that week. What makes her unusual is that she wrote it all down. One notepad, carried the whole way, filled with recipes in her own hand, with amounts crossed out and replaced, notes in the margin about what she learned the hard way, and the occasional line about who ate it and whether they came back for more.

She is a wife and a mother, not a chef, and has never worked in a restaurant. The recipes here are the ones that survived being cooked over and over for people who would say if they did not like it.

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Benjamin Boulter

Benjamin edited the book: typing up the notepad, testing the recipes against what was written, and working through the English so it says what the Korean says. Where the two versions differ slightly, the Korean is the original and the English is the translation that got closest.

Dodechi

Dodechi is the small independent press publishing Kimchi & Chill.