Rice Table: Korean Recipes and Stories to Feed the Soul

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This is the taste of home," she says. "Making this dish taught me so much about how I could reconnect to my culture, my heritage and myself. I didn’t know that… Honeybees’ fuzzy body hair has the correct electric charge to attract pollen grains. Photography: Kim Lightbody Cheese expert Emma Young uses her experience as maker, judge and cheesemonger to create a flavour-led guide to everything from reblochon to caerphilly. The ‘wheel’ refers to the six chapters at the heart of the book: Fresh, Bloomy Rind, Washed Rind, Blue, Soft, Semi Hard, into which over 100 cheeses are allotted based on their dominant character. There are notes about tasting, pairing, origins and creating cheeseboards.

Donkkaseu is still served in restaurants around South Korea, but it's also easy to make at home. Scott shares a recipe for her take on the dish, called Old-School Pork Cutlet, in her cookbook. This is an ode to the bright yellow Korean curry that my mother used to make with ready-made ottogi curry powder. Eat with kimchi. Remove the pork from the fridge. Scrape off as much of the marinade as possible and pat the meat dry with kitchen paper. Have three shallow, rimmed plates or trays ready: one filled with the flour, one with the egg and one with the panko breadcrumbs. Spray the breadcrumbs with a little water to moisten. Scott tells us in her Introduction that just shy of 20 years old she “ left a home that [she] never really felt [she] belonged to and was eager to dive deep into [her] newfound freedom and immerse [her]self fully in London life“. Desperate to be accepted by the the city she fell in love with, she didn’t want to be recognised as a foreigner; she wanted to belong. Now, over two decades on, Scott is married to an Englishman she met within her first few years here, and the couple have their dual-heritage daughter, Kiki. Place the onion and milk in a food processor and blend until smooth. Stir in the garlic powder and salt. Pour over the tenderised pork and refrigerate for 30 minutes.Quadrille has snaffled up rights to Rice Table, “an exploration of Korean food culture and identity, through 80 delicious recipes” by début author Su Scott, in a three-way auction. Scotland-based Sumayya Usmani’s exploration of the food of Pakistan is full of enticing recipes, but this is a memoir, too, about growing up as a woman in Pakistan in the 1980s and 90s, and how cooking helped Sumayya find her place in the world. The other dish that "really connected me to the Korean food of my childhood was kimchi stew", Scott says. She started cobbling together the ingredients for this dish without really thinking about what she was doing, and felt a "moment of euphoria" when it all came together. A Korean living in the UK, Su Scott was thrown into a crisis of identity when motherhood dawned, one which she only found her way out of by cooking the dishes of her Korean childhood, seeking out the flavors and textures of memories that she hopes to pass on to her daughter. Toss the cabbage in a bowl with the Worcestershire sauce and olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Divide the pork cutlets between two individual plates without slicing. Pour the warm brown sauce generously over the top. Serve with shredded cabbage salad.

The step-by-step tutorials include images numerous enough to guide and few enough not to confuse. The appealing recipes showcase the different pasta forms superbly: gemelli with slow-cooked pork shoulder ragù and saffron lorighittas with blue swimmer crab made me particularly hungry. The subtitle – The Many Shapes Of A Family Tradition – reflects the importance of family food traditions and connections that run through the book. This could be partly to do with the fact that, more often than not, most recipes call for ‘wet' rice flour: freshly milled rice flour made from pre-soaked rice.

Where do you find inspiration?

Rice Table explores how immigration and motherhood impacted my identity as woman, using food and food memories as a medium which have been such an integral part of my journey of reconnecting to my Korean heritage. The recipes included in the book are the dishes that helped me connect the dots to rebuild my Korean identity. I wanted the recipes to carry personal meanings and stories, in hope to pass on to my daughter. Where do you find inspiration? Scott calls it a “hard” and “lonely” experience, but says it was “very rewarding, because you come out the other side knowing exactly who you are”. Wipe down the pan and heat the reserved oil. Stir in the sliced spring onion whites and cook for 1-2 minutes over a medium heat until they sizzle and smell fragrant. Add the garlic, ginger, pork and a good pinch of salt, and stir-fry for about 3 minutes to brown the pork, while energetically moving the pan to stop the alliums from burning. Kimchi jjigae was part of a more complex story. In 2019, Scott was struggling with loneliness. She had moved to London in 2000 but had come to feel she was a foreigner both in the UK and in Korea.