my coworker jay invited me over earlier this week for something called 말복 (malbok). i said sure, what is it. he said “last of the dog days. we eat boiling chicken soup.” the forecast that morning said ninety-one.
i laughed. i laughed at the man to his face.
he let me finish. and you should know jay grew up in jersey — he does the fourth of july like the rest of us, his dad owns two smokers, i’ve eaten that man’s ribs. so when he waited a beat and asked what we do on the fourth of july, he wasn’t being rhetorical. he was setting a trap and i walked straight into it.
because what we do on the fourth of july is stand in my brother-in-law’s driveway in ninety-five degree heat, three feet from a charcoal grill running north of five hundred degrees, holding a beer that gets warm in four minutes, eating chicken that comes off that grate hot enough to take skin off. every year. we call it a good time. not one person has ever called it strange.
so i shut up, said yes, and then spent two nights reading about soup, because i wasn’t about to show up at a man’s house with no idea why i was there.
the folk explanation is 이열치열 (iyeolchiyeol), “fight heat with heat,” which sounds like something you say to justify a decision you already made. but there’s a defensible version of it. there’s a 2012 paper out of ottawa where guys drank hot versus cold fluid while cycling, and the hot-drink group ended up with lower total body heat storage. hot liquid trips sensors in your esophagus and stomach, your body over-corrects, and you end up sweating off more heat than the drink put in. that extra sweat evaporates, evaporation pulls the heat off you. net negative. you drink something hot and you end up cooler.
the senior author on that paper is named ollie jay. i am not making that up. i sat with that for a minute.
big asterisk though, and the asterisk is the whole story: it only works if the sweat can actually evaporate. it’s right there in the title — under conditions that permit full evaporation. and those conditions were a lab at about seventy-five degrees and twenty-three percent humidity. not a hot room. a mild dry one, picked on purpose so every drop could leave the skin. now go stand that guy in a korean august — humidity around seventy or eighty percent, dead air, nothing moving. the sweat just parks on him. all of the heat load, none of the cooling. real physics that quits working on the exact day people bring it up.
the day itself is old, and the reason for it is boring, which is usually how you know it’s the real one. it’s a farming calendar. the three 복 (bok) days land on the worst stretch of the rice season — you’re in a flooded field all day, dumping water and salt, and protein was not exactly falling out of the sky in pre-industrial korea. so you eat the heaviest thing anyone can put in front of you. that part goes back centuries.
what’s actually in the pot does not. for most of that run the bok-day dish was a stew — beef in the houses that could afford it, dog in the ones that couldn’t. i flinched. then i thought about the driveway. samgyetang isn’t in the old cookbooks at all. it turns up under japanese occupation, wealthy houses stirring powdered ginseng into plain boiled chicken, and it doesn’t take the throne until the sixties. so the day picked a meal, then quietly swapped it out from under itself, and nobody thought to renegotiate the date.
which is the whole thing, actually. once you see that shape, our stuff stops looking normal either. a louisiana crawfish boil is twenty gallons of water at a rolling boil over an open propane burner on the gulf coast in may. a cape cod clam bake is a pit of rocks heated until they glow, in august. nobody’s doing either one because it’s refreshing. they’re doing it because that’s when the crawfish are running and that’s when everyone’s already at the beach. the calendar picks the day. the menu turns out to be negotiable. the temperature just has to be survived.
small thing i loved: it used to be called gyesamtang (계삼탕) — chicken-ginseng-soup, chicken in front. then refrigerators arrived in the sixties, whole ginseng root could survive the trip to a restaurant instead of showing up as powder, and somebody flipped it to samgyetang (삼계탕). ginseng to the front. the ingredient got more expensive to look at, so it moved up in the name. you can literally watch the syllables trade places. if you’ve worked anywhere near marketing you know exactly what happened there.
texted all of this to jay the night before last. he replied in about nine seconds.
“lmao you looked all that up. it’s a cookout with a different chicken. bring beer.”
writing this from the passenger seat of my brother-in-law’s car, on the way to an early shift. same driveway. he asked what i was typing, i said soup, he let it go.
and the forecast has come down all week. eighty-two now, rain in it. out here in the dark it’s sixty-three degrees and my window is up. two nights reading about evaporation and heat storage and body heat balance, and the day just declined to be hot.
which is the point, i think. nobody’s moving it. the pot goes on either way.
so that’s tonight. soup still boiling when it hits the table, and i’m bringing beer.
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