This (Is Why Sundubu-Jjigae Reminds me of Lambchop's 2019 Album)

Korea seems to have been having a cultural moment this last few years or so. From the K-Pop phenomenon through to Parasite cleaning up at the 2020 Oscars, and rightfully so. It has permeated my life, that’s for certain – in the music I listen to and the food I eat and cook, predominantly.

My partner and I both recently finished reading the grief-stricken yet astonishingly hopeful memoir by Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast fame, tracking the tumultuous period from her mother’s cancer diagnosis to her untimely death to her rise to indie household status. A lot of it seems to deal with a catharsis through food, namely Korean food. Her learning to cook it; learning to appreciate dishes and flavour profiles she once had not.

This led to a hankering for me to try more of it. Sadly, this seems hard to come by as a vegan, even in London. Thankfully, however, The Korean Vegan – a lawyer turned TikTok chef whom I had followed for some time – had just released a cookbook. Thoughtful as ever, my girlfriend treated me to this as a surprise. Although I’m still not sure whether it was more a treat for me or herself.

Opening the book at random to about halfway, we knew the dish we had to first try out: sundubu-jjigae.

Sundubu is otherwise known as – the oft maligned – silken tofu. A lot of people don’t know what to do with it and end up making the most egregious mistakes with it. I, myself, was once one of these people. In the right setting, this is a comfort food like no other.

A jjigae is effectively a stew.

Having grown up with rustic cooking all my life, a staple dish of my mum’s was potage (pronounced more like ‘fromage’ not ‘marriage’). An English stew with roots in medieval peasant cooking. Its staples are cabbage, potatoes, peas, and effectively any excess green veg found in the pantry. You can chuck bread in there. And lettuce. Maybe top it with some salsa verde if it’s summer. Or winter, even.

Sundubu-jjigae struck such a chord with me from the first slurp, for its astonishing and unlikely similarity to one of my own childhood staples.

At its heart it is simply brothy; slightly gravyish. It is rich and deep, with a warm undercurrent of chilli, courtesy of bloomed gochugaru flakes. A deglazing of the pan with soy sauce brings all the flavour in and adds a distinctly enveloping feel. This dish is a total warm embrace. I would highly recommend it to any single friends this winter.

Despite its simplicity, however, I couldn’t believe just how my expectations had been subverted. This was not the spicy, sticky, gochujang-centric food that I had been conditioned to think of as the absolute norm of Korean cooking. This was rich and enveloping, yet light and undaunting somehow. It was totally inviting.

It was cleverly challenging in the simplest of ways: myself and my girlfriend were most astonished by the unlikely successful marriage of courgette, potato, and silken tofu.

It immediately made me think of an album. As most things do.

“This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You)” by Lambchop.

Lambchop are a long-running alt. country band from Nashville, Tennessee.

Their entire career has been an exercise in subverting expectation by having never once adhered to the Nashville sound.

Their 2019 outing is undoubtedly their most radical departure.

Having been warmed up by 2016’s fantastic “FLOTUS”, fans knew that Kurt Wagner had been flirting heavily with electronica and especially autotune.

“This”, however, is most perplexing in featuring – in place of ambient vignettes – legitimate late night club bangers amid cavernous techno-tinged, ‘auto-crooned’ (to paraphrase Anthony Fantano) epics.

I’d like to take the album’s de facto centrepiece as summing up exactly what it is this album does. Somehow, in some vague sense, you could imagine “The Lasting Last of You” as either a lovelorn piano or acoustic number; pedal steel left and right, maybe a nasal female vocal accompaniment. However, it’s armour is atmospheric, cavernous, reverbed: the baby of an even more oddball Willie Nelson-type and Jamie xx.

Imagine if, maybe, Bill Callahan was really into Drake’s “Take Care”; maybe even some of the cuts from “Nothing Was the Same”.

A 60-odd year-old alt. country singer from Tennessee who lays floors as a side hustle marrying country with techno and ambient sounds like an experimental nightmare: contrarian for the sake of it.

However, when you separate every element of what this album does, everything is actually strikingly familiar. The opener of the album – “The New Isn’t So You Anymore” is a somewhat jazz-inflected, linear traditional song at its core. It has a harmonica solo courtesy of studio session legend Charlie McCoy. It’s filled with Wagner’s same old oddball lyrics. The only real demarcation from a traditional Lambchop is the slathering of autotune and programmed percussion. There’s nothing here to make anyone feel uncomfortable. It’s simply the gentlest subversion of expectation across the whole forty-six or so minutes.

Despite the surface-level clash of genres, this is an enveloping, cosy album experience quite unlike any other.

Just like sundubu-jjigae. The trio of courgette, potato, and tofu may perplex you for a moment, but you’ll undoubtedly be soothed once you take that first mouthful.