Cook Korean!

A Comic Book with Recipes

Robin Ha

This is a fun-to-read, fun-to-cook comic book/cookbook hybrid that brings colorful, nourishing Korean food into your home kitchen. Bonus! It comes with a side of family drama and insight.

First, a few words about graphic cookbooks. Done right, graphic cookbooks steal the best trick from a cooking video: You watch the hands actually do the thing. They crush the garlic, they fold the dumpling — without sacrificing the best trick of a book: It stays still. With a graphic cookbook, you can see the whole recipe at once, or flip back three panels to review, instead of scrubbing a video bar. A good cartoonist can simplify and focus visuals in a way that’s hard to do in photography. That superpower applied to cooking? Chef’s kiss.

This book begins with a shout on the cover. A comic-style speech bubble on the title page says simply COOK KOREAN! over a yellow field. It’s as if the book is a friend grabbing you by both shoulders. Inside, it delivers 60+ recipes over ten chapters with everything from homemade kimchi and pickles to soups, stews, and street food. There’s a whole chapter devoted to anju (drinking snacks) and a ‘Korean Fusion’ chapter at the back for things like kimchi-galbi burgers. (The closest English translation for ‘kimchi-galbi’ might be ‘short ribs and pickles,’ which is a strong argument for culinary mashups.)

But there’s more going on here than recipes, and it starts with a confession. The author Ha subverts expectations and admits she grew up with zero interest in cooking. Her mother did everything — quickly and wordlessly. So Ha thought cooking was something she’d never be able to do. Like many students, she lived on instant ramen through college. Then, during a homestay in Italy, a host mother taught her how to make pasta and work a grill. Back at home, cooking became Ha’s decompression from work. When friends asked how she made her food, she couldn’t explain it. ‘Most Koreans don’t measure anything while cooking. Besides, I am a cartoonist, not a chef.’

But, to try to share what she knew, she started a Tumblr called Banchan in Two Pages; named for banchan, the small side dishes served with a Korean meal. She drew recipes step by step, panel by panel, and this delightful book grew out of that desire to share in the best way she knew how: with comics.

Along the way to teaching you recipes, Ha stirs in useful bits of culture. She introduces what’s in the Korean refrigerator and pantry, describes the structure of a traditional Korean meal, and gets real about the rituals of Korean drinking culture: ‘Never refuse a drink from your elders. Receive your drink with both hands. Drink it facing away from your elder.’ There’s even a one-page folk story about how a beloved dish might have gotten its name.

Proving that food is love, the acknowledgements section adds emotional heft to this bright, breezy work. On the final page, Ha writes that she’d barely cooked with her mother until she started this project, despite growing up eating her mother’s food. The eight months of recipe-testing they did together became ‘an emotional roller coaster.’ She closes with these lines: ‘We find it so difficult to say I love you out loud to each other. Maybe we are too tough, shy, or stubborn. Or maybe those words just can’t contain all of our feelings.’

This book is inspiring and fun; the kimchi instructions alone are worth the cover price. The immersion into Korean culture and its food is deep, satisfying, and well done. Somewhere between the ingredients lists and the acknowledgments page, this stops being a cookbook and starts being a love letter to family and heritage.

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