still working through what i learned at jay’s place last week.
somebody at the table — jay’s uncle, i think — said his son 미역국을 마셨다. drank seaweed soup. and the whole room made the same noise at the same time. the noise you make when a friend tells you he got laid off.
it means he failed his entrance exam.
so i asked, obviously, and got about four answers at once, which is how i ended up with the following.
미역국 is a soup made from sea mustard, the ribbon kind of seaweed. it is the birthday soup. you eat it on your birthday, every year. and the reason you eat it on your birthday is that your mother ate it after giving birth to you — it’s the postpartum food, iodine and calcium and iron, the stuff you need after that particular week.
so the birthday version is a thank-you note you eat. i think that’s the nicest food fact i’ve picked up in a while and it isn’t even the interesting part.
the interesting part is that 미역 is slippery. genuinely slippery, that texture is the whole point of it. and the korean verb for slipping, 미끄러지다, is also the verb for failing an exam. so eating the slippery thing before a test is asking for it. students avoid it. families don’t cook it that week.
and there’s a counter-move, which is the part that got me. instead you give the kid 엿, a hard sticky taffy, or 찹쌀떡, glutinous rice cake. because those stick. you stick to the school instead of sliding off it. people press taffy onto the school gates on exam day.
so it’s a pun that has a texture, and an approved workaround, and everybody’s grandmother knows the rules. jay’s uncle also told me the expression supposedly goes back to the korean army being disbanded in 1907 and dismissed soldiers “eating seaweed soup.” i’ve seen that repeated and i couldn’t find a solid source for it, so treat it as a story people tell.
i told my mother about this on the phone. she loved it. she loved it considerably more than i did.
she has now decided she is buying hawaiian butter mochi for my year-end performance review. from the place in allston. she was specific about that. because butter mochi is sticky, and sticky is the point.
butter mochi is made with coconut milk. i am allergic to coconut. i pointed this out.
she said she was aware.
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