In South Korea, military service is mandatory for men — typically between eighteen months and two years, depending on the branch. I served eighteen months in the army, beginning at twenty-one. I have deliberately said very little about those eighteen months over the years, and I will not say much here either. What I will say is that the food was not good, that I thought about my mother's cooking with a frequency I found surprising, and that doenjang jjigae — fermented soybean paste stew — was the dish I thought about most.
I was discharged on a Thursday morning in March. My mother didn't know what time I'd arrive home — the journey from the base involved two bus changes and I hadn't called ahead. I came up the stairs of the apartment building in Busan, and the smell reached me before I reached our floor. Doenjang. That distinctive, funky, deeply savoury fermented smell that non-Koreans sometimes describe with diplomatic hesitation — it is an acquired smell, and most Koreans acquire it so early in life that it becomes the smell of something they can't quite name.
She heard me at the door before I knocked. She had been making it all morning. The ttukbaegi — the traditional earthenware pot, not to be confused with a dolsot, which is the stone pot used for bibimbap — was still bubbling when she put it on the table. Tofu, zucchini, a few small potatoes, dried mushrooms that had been soaking since the night before. Spring onion on top. A pot of white rice beside it.
I should say something about doenjang itself, because it's often misunderstood. It is a Korean fermented soybean paste, made from meju — dried soybean blocks — that has been fermented in saltwater brine and then separated from the liquid (the liquid becomes ganjang, Korean soy sauce). The process takes months. Unlike Japanese miso, which uses a koji starter culture to initiate fermentation, doenjang ferments naturally — through the microorganisms already present on the dried soybeans. The flavour is earthier, less sweet, and more intensely funky than miso. It is not a substitute for miso. It is a completely different thing.
My mother has been making doenjang jjigae the same way since before I was born. She uses dried anchovies and kelp for the stock — she simmers them and discards them before adding the paste. She adds the vegetables in a specific order, the ones that take longer first. She adds the tofu last and doesn't stir it vigorously — it would break — and she finishes with a drop of sesame oil that she calls the signature, though she would never describe it that way.
We ate that Thursday lunch in near silence. There wasn't much to say that the food wasn't already saying. I had been away for eighteen months. I had eaten 547 meals that were not her cooking. I had thought about this meal — specifically this meal, not some abstraction — on what felt like most of those days. And now I was home, and the ttukbaegi was on the table, and the rice was ready, and I ate three bowls, which she observed without comment but with a satisfaction I could see from across the table.
I am thirty-four now. I make this dish myself — I've lived alone in the same apartment in Busan for six years, and my mother's kitchen is a twenty-minute bus ride away, but I make it at least once a week. I have never once smelled it without thinking of that Thursday in March, the stairwell, and the moment I knew without any further evidence that I was home.
