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The cook

Miyeong Jeon전미영

Author of Kimchi & Chill

A Korean home cook who spent twenty years cooking far from home, wrote down everything she made, and ended up with a cookbook.

Twenty years away

For the past twenty years Miyeong has cooked a long way from where she grew up. Kitchens she did not choose, shops that did not stock what the recipe wanted, and a family who still expected dinner. That is the condition every one of these recipes was worked out under, and it is why so many of them have a substitution written into the margin.

How she cooks

She cooks for a family, on weeknights, with whatever is in the fridge. That is the whole method. There is no restaurant training behind the recipes and no professional kitchen anywhere in the story. What there is instead is repetition: the same dishes made hundreds of times, adjusted a little each time, until they stopped needing adjustment.

The notepad

The notepad started as a place to keep the things she did not want to forget. A ratio for a sauce. How long the anchovy broth actually needs. Which of two ways of doing a stew turned out better. It went everywhere she went, and over twenty years it filled up. Because it was never meant for anyone else, it is honest in a way published recipes usually are not. Amounts are crossed out. Whole methods are written over. Some pages have a note about who ate it and what they said.

What she cooks

The four chapters are a map of those twenty years. Korean food is the backbone, the cooking she did to stay close to home: stews, banchan, noodles, and the kimchi her mother taught her. The Chinese-style chapter is what a Korean kitchen actually makes alongside it. The Western chapter is what she picked up living where she lived, rewritten to work with a Korean pantry. The snacks and baking came out of one small oven and the afternoons that needed filling.

Why the recipes can be trusted

Every recipe in the book was cooked repeatedly by the person who wrote it, for people who would say so if it was not good. Cooking Korean food far from Korea also means solving the same problem over and over: what to do when the right ingredient is not in the shop. Those answers are in the recipes rather than left for the reader. Everything was then tested again against the written version during editing, because a recipe that works in a cook's hands does not always work on the page. Where the two disagreed, the page changed.

In short

Name

Miyeong Jeon (전미영)

Role

Author, Kimchi & Chill

Cooking

Twenty years, mostly away from Korea

Recipes in the book

90

Languages

English and Korean

Publisher

Dodechi