my fave (pseudo) family food

I know this is going to sound strange, but I think it plays in well with our discussion about the politics of food and the ways in which it crosses national and cultural boundaries. Growing up, one of my favorite family dishes was kah-reh (I wish I knew how to post in Korean font, like Sparkle). This is better known as curry to the rest of you. I am full Korean American and I know that curry is traditionally an Indian dish, but I grew up thinking that it was a Korean dish until I learned that kah-reh was curry. To add to the cultural fusion, the brand of kah-reh that my family buys from the Korean supermarket is actually a Japanese brand, S&B Golden Curry. It is a yellow curry and I can only handle the Mild but add kick to it with some kim-chi. :)

The kah-reh comes in a cardboard box and is basically a solidified bar of curry (it looks like a curry chocolate bar) that is slowly added to water (one square at a time) and other essential ingredients. For my family, these ingredients include carrots, chunks of beef and dices of potato. Once these are all cooked together, the kah-reh is poured over a bowlful of hot white rice and enjoyed.

I LOVE the smell of cooking kah-reh and I can eat two to three bowl fulls of the stuff. No matter how full I am, I always get seconds and thirds. This is my serious comfort food. Quick and easy to make but so satisfying and fulfilling. I am a little OCD about eating it because I have a system. I have to have the right proportion of rice to meat to potato to kim-chi in every spoonful. I don't particularly like boiled carrots, so I eat all of those off of my dish first. then, I methodically fish out a piece of beef and potato with my spoon of rice, lay a kim-chi slice on top and enjoy all the flavors together in my mouth. This stands out in my memory because as a kid, I hated eating different foods at once. The thought of them mixing together in my mouth simply grossed me out. This is odd for Koreans because the whole point is to eat your rice with all of these different side dishes, but I would eat everything one by one - the only exception being kah-reh. Come to think of it, this may be why my mom cooked kah-reh so often. I don't know why I had this compulsion, or how it relates to the politics of food, but I thought I would mention it. I no longer have this strange fixation on separating my food... but it does creep up on me from time to time.

There is another odd way in which kah-reh reminds me of my childhood. I would read stories about stone soup or see commercials for beef stew (which was a completely foreign and "white" food to me) and kah-reh was my "Korean version" of such foods. That is why I was so shocked when I later found out that it was an Indian cuisine and the writing on the box was in Japanese.


In any case, I still enjoy it and consider it to be one of my childhood and family foods. Is that strange?