Season's Grazings

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Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen

by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall

Ten Speed Press, 272 pp., $29.95

Oddly enough, very few cookbooks concentrating on the delicious, healthy, and widely varied cuisine of Korea have been written in English. This new cookbook vividly reveals the subtle nuances of Korean cuisine in a simple yet dynamic fashion, focusing on not only the food, but also the lifestyle of rural Korea.

Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall's mother and grandmother are her primary influences; they handed down the 175 recipes here, which range from simple family fare to more exotic royal palace dishes. The recipes are presented in a style that the basic home or professional cook can follow easily, with introductions that illustrate fascinating historical and cultural background information. Most of the ingredients are easily obtained, and substitutions are provided if necessary.

We held a Korean tasting dinner with recipes made from the book, and found the dishes incredibly delicious and quite easily prepared, with almost all preparation done in advance and quickly cooked at the last minute. A spicy and flavorful soup of chicken, tofu, and kimchi dumplings is the perfect light starter. No Korean meal would be complete without a grill, and we chose the delectable skewers of marinated beef tenderloin, interspersed with sweet green onions, oyster mushrooms, and crunchy Napa cabbage.

The delicate and elegant royal banquet dish of fish fillet stuffed with chicken, tofu, and spinach, topped with lemon and red chile threads, is as beautiful as it is tasty. Braised shiitake mushrooms stuffed with tofu and ground beef in rice wine and sesame oil is an aromatic side dish loaded with flavor. The perfect finish is the chilled fruit soup with pine nuts and mint.

Korean cuisine is so much more than what is typically found on Korean restaurant menus, and the full scope of real Korean cooking is fascinatingly revealed in Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen.