Su Scott Remembers The Comfort Of Bland Cabbage
(This interview was transcribed and edited)
What’s your name? Where do you really come from and what do you do?
I’m Su Scott. I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, but I came to the UK in 2000, a few months shy of 20. Even though I had a very wild, colourful childhood, and didn’t get on with South Korean society back then, I was still very innocent coming over here. When I look back at my journey, I see how desperate I was to leave home. If somebody were to ask me, ‘can you do it again?’ I don't know if I could.
I was recently thinking about this ‘where you really come from’ question. The question sat quite uncomfortably for me for a time. It’s quite hurtful, isn’t it? Not in this context, but with white western people. I find it’s all about context. I find myself changing my answer whenever it suits me. For the first 10 years of my life in the UK, when people asked me that question, I would answer it with wherever I was living at that time, and didn’t feel the need to give them all of the information. But that’s partly because when I first came here I didn’t speak English. It was a real effort to survive for the first couple of years, when you can’t communicate and articulate yourself in effective ways. So I made myself a promise that I would make sure I speak English very well - enough that they don’t question where I’m from.
But that promise became a real problem when I had my daughter because I suddenly realised I had deliberately removed myself from my community and was left with nothing that reminded me of home. I realised: I don’t speak Korean very well now, I don’t have any Korean friends and I don’t speak to my parents often enough because we have a complicated relationship where it’s better if we don’t speak too often.
Tell me about the cookbook you’ve just written.
I’m a freelance food writer and recipe developer. This book was something I have always wanted to do. I never thought I was going to write a book in English, but it makes sense because I have now lived here for longer than I have lived in Korea.
The book is about my struggle with losing the sense of who I am when my daughter was born in 2015. I had a great pregnancy and amazing birth. I felt so powerful. The interesting part is I didn’t actually want to have a child, but I met the right partner and he really wanted to have children. I called a bluff - ‘no marriage, no child!’ because I knew that he didn’t want to get married. But he said yes, so we got married. So then we had a really long conversation about whether we really want to bring a child into this world - I felt it was too much responsibility and didn’t know if I had it in me. Eventually we decided, OK, we’ll give it a go.
I thought I was going to be great at being a mother, if I’m honest, but the moment my daughter was born I fell very ill. For the first four months I was going back and forth to intensive care to have treatment while trying to breastfeed. That shakes your world because you’re suddenly faced with this newborn, and you’re in this bubble, but there’s also a threat to your health and ultimately you think of the worst thing that could happen.
That made me really search my soul and ask a lot of questions: Why am I here? What am I doing? What’s my purpose? Where am I from? Who am I? Then my post-natal depression hit me in a subtle, creeping way. I was very normal and bubbly when meeting people, but internally I was terribly depressed. When I eventually came out of it, I felt compelled to write about it - not for anybody else, but for my daughter, to which this book is dedicated.
It stemmed from the fear that I am the sole bearer of this culture that she inherited. The job of mother weighed heavily on me and if I am unsure of who I am and what this culture represents, how am I going to live with that responsibility when she asks the question herself when she’s older? And she doesn’t have a great relationship with my parents, there is a distance there. So I wanted to give her a fair understanding of her beginnings.
I haven’t given birth but I experienced the death of a parent, and I often feel that those big life-changing events raise a lot of existential questions. It feels like your postnatal depression was also linked to this 15 year identity loss, and then a different identity loss where you become a mother. Motherhood, Korean-ness and the food, it’s all interrelated…
One of the things that really hit me was, as someone who had been an outgoing, independent woman who always worked, suddenly being left at home with this child. I still remember when my husband went back to work after two weeks, and the door slamming behind me like thunder; my whole world collapsing. It was the moment of realisation that I am no longer that same person. In that very moment I realised, maybe this is why I never wanted to have a child, because I wanted to keep that identity that I worked really hard for. Now I’m no longer called by my name, or my position at work. Now, I’m Kiki’s mum.
Some people are natural mothers. I’m not. It was hard realising I’m not that kind of mum. But there was such peer pressure in my group of girls, who were in exactly the same situation, and it was weird for them to hear I wasn’t that kind of mother. I was just a little bit different the way I was thinking of this whole process - I literally treated it as a job, because I wanted to do the best job!
So my book is so complex, and it’s modelled on this one topic of Korean food, but it is also about immigration - how it affects you psychologically - but also how motherhood changes you as a woman and person. When you give birth you lose a lot, but there are many women living behind this skin [points to her face]. You’re constantly juggling and negotiating within yourself as well.
You write and develop recipes from many different cuisines and cultures for a living. Now you’ve created something very personal about Korean food. How was it different for you? How did you research it, being away from Korea?
I don’t think you truly appreciate your culture until you feel like you’ve lost it. I didn’t particularly worship the food or see the importance of it. I took it for granted because I grew up with it. But when I started to feel very homesick, having lived for 15 years not being in touch with my culture, the first thing I reached out to was food because it’s the most tangible thing. I had that Eureka moment of - oh my god, this is bringing me the taste and sense of home, and maybe this is how I’m going to reconnect with my culture.
I did a lot of reading of food blogs and YouTube. Technology is quite amazing, isn’t it? But the recipes in the book were mainly based on my childhood memories. I wanted to champion those very ordinary moments that happened in my parents’ and my maternal grandmother’s kitchen, who I spent a lot of time with.
When I was proposing this book the representation of Korean food in the UK was especially lacking, not really reflecting a real sense of culture. I understood that because of the lack of representation, if I were to present this cuisine with my name on it, I would have to carry some sort of responsibility and be accountable for what I’m presenting. So I wanted there to be a specific angle to it - for me it’s all about home cooking, because that’s what connected me back to my roots.
Your recipes were based on childhood memories. Do you see limitations in trying to recreate nostalgic moments?
Completely. You can’t always recreate it. And what you create is likely to be very different, because our memories are biased. Also, our palates change, as do the kitchens that we’re cooking in. I do say this in the book; that I’d like to say it’s full of hand-me-down recipes but it’s not. In my case, it’s more about relying on the memories of taste and trying to recreate it to suit my palate now.
What’s lovely about trying to recreate memories is that you unlock a lot of small details that make you realise, Oh, that’s why that happened. Sometimes it’s nothing to do with food but it brings another layer of understanding that you didn’t have before. I think I came to understand my mother a lot more. My father too; part of the reason I wanted to leave home was because I didn’t get on with my dad, who was very strict, traditional and conservative.
I think what you’re revealing is that it was so much about the process of writing these recipes than the recipe itself.
I cried a lot. I joked to my publisher that we ought to sell the book with a box of tissues. It was hard, but I knew that was the only way to do it. Sometimes I would hit a wall - right in the middle of it I suddenly thought, Oh my god, is anyone going to get this? I’m actually so fucking scared. I had to take a long walk to really process why I was writing this and what the book was for, what I promised to myself and to my child. I had to bring myself back to the centre - to write it the way I see it.
I’m so excited to receive it. I think there’ll be elements that speak to different people on different levels.
Even this thought that I’m a first generation immigrant only just came to me. And I’m raising a child who’s going to live her life straddling two cultures, trying to make sense of who she is in future.
Well, these are also labels we need to put on others and ourselves. How do you feel Korean-ness is portrayed in Britain in particular, and how it fits into the ‘Asian’ label? How do you feel about ‘Asian’ and its possibilities vs limitations?
The Korea that is known to Britain is very limited. There is a lot more to be discussed. But I feel that Korean people in the UK have mostly kept to themselves so there isn’t really an ambassador of the culture. It’s not just about K-beauty and K-drama. And K-pop is a very small part of the capitalism that drives the economy. I talk about the food all the time; it’s not just bulgogi and kimchi. Being ‘trendy’ comes with the damaging factors of everybody jumping in.
Korean culture ‘trending’ in the last five or six years is really indicative of the way that certain cultures become commodified. Especially food, music, those surface level cultural practices - it’s interesting to examine not just how others consume it, but also how we present and commodify it from within. I can imagine it’s something you negotiate as an ‘ambassador’, whether you like it or not.
This is why I wanted to focus on home cooking that I grew up with, instead of focusing on what’s popular or trending, because food carries layers of history and stories. It’s a reflection of the society and the country that I grew up in. Korea in the 80s, 90s, was very much a country that wanted to achieve better and greater. We had just secured a full democracy. It was like, let’s work hard, let’s play hard. We can create a great country together. The economic growth in Korea is remarkable - I went back last year and was shocked.
So you have to be inquiring with an open mind all the time, if you are a writer ‘representing’ the culture. Also, I’m not really in with the gatekeepers. Open dialogue has to be at the centre of any conversation in order for us the evolve. Food has travelled, been cooked and misrepresented and done badly, but that’s how we get to know about these different cuisines!
So the difference is that writers have to deliver on all accounts, rather than be driven by capitalist trends. Perhaps by bringing attention to human stories. There’s a lot to be said about small things.
Moving on to cabbage…
I love cabbage. I really wanted to champion cabbage in my book. It’s such a pity that people think it’s unpalatable. I have such wonderful memories of cabbage. My mother, who comes from the western coast, her cooking was very much a rustic, country style, whereas my father, who’s from Seoul, is more about the details. But they both loved humble, honest food. I suppose they grew up in an era when food wasn’t plentiful.
I grew up eating a lot of steamed cabbages wrapped up in a thickened fermented bean paste stew. It wasn’t anything fancy - just really tasty, delicious, honest food. At the time I definitely did not appreciate it but looking back on it, those are just the special things that not many people talk about. I think that gentleness and sweetness that tastes almost bland, of a beautifully steamed cabbage, that is really vegetal and soft and neutral, is so comforting.
The cabbage recipe I have shared with you is based on my memory of eating this lovely, boiled or steamed cabbage dipped in a vinegar gochujang sauce. But I redeveloped it by charring it under a hot grill, so you get beautifully gnarly, burnt edges, with sugar that caramelises it to work really nicely with the bitterness. I use hot oil as a flavour carrier, which is not a very traditional Korean technique but is prevalent in Chinese cooking.
The dish is sharp, tangy and sweet. You let it sit to take up the flavour. It’s nice to eat immediately, but it’s so much more delicious the next day, when it’s cold and just come out of the fridge.
I’m so passionate about cabbages!
I love what you said about the blandness because, if you said something was bland here, it would be considered undesirable. And this is the reason I love congee - there’s something about the blandness where you can make it your own, and as you say, it’s linked to cultural notions of comfort. Do you think that culturally acquired tastes can be translated at all? Does it need to be learned from a young age; is it something you’re trying to do with your daughter?
It has to be taught in context. Because palate is something that can be trained, unless you’re talking about very extreme taste. My daughter and I are going through a lot of horrendous food moments - she’s not a very good eater at all! We used to fight a lot and I’ve given up on it. I’m leaving it to her. My job is to put it in front of her and explain what it is. But I think what’s important when convincing somebody is to deliver a story that they can relate to on some level.
Food is such an equaliser in that it brings people together, but it can also be a divider that separates people. It’s so important to try other cuisines, especially now as the world is getting closer yet more divisive. Even amongst different cuisines, there are always similarities that could translate over to somebody.
What about those border-crossing Korean cuisines? Like the interesting stuff happening at the Chinese or Russian border.
When I was doing research for this book, I had very little idea about Korea and the impact of its geographic location to the nation’s cuisine and history, like the wars and trading routes. We often forget about North Korea. Sure, we’re a different country now, but there was a time when we were three kingdoms spreading to China in the north and Russia on the right. There evidence of trading and influence of Chinese cuisine is really evident. Perhaps because I am exposed to Chinese food in London, I can see that. Don’t forget the influence of Japanese cuisine, because we were under Japanese occupation. It’s fascinating.
It reminds me of that big online argument, when someone said that kimchi was Chinese and the whole Internet blew up.
Oh gosh. I try not to get involved in those things because they get blown out of proportion. Anyway, to me Korean food has such a similarity to Italian food, but maybe that’s because I love Italian food and do a lot of rustic Italian home cooking and can draw the parallels. When you pay attention you realise there are so many similarities that bring us together. I’m a Buddhist and for me it’s always about seeing the goodness and positivity. We all breathe the same.
Indeed we all breathe in the same language. So what do you think of Asian slaw?
At the heart of it, I can see that it stems from admiration for Asian food. I do think Asian food is incredibly intricate in its technicality, and the way we utilise ordinary things to make them delicious is very resourceful as a nation.
But to call a dish ‘Asian slaw’... there are about 48 countries in Asia, with each cuisine representing different flavour profiles. For you to call it an ‘Asian slaw’ is beyond me. It’s dangerous, isn’t it? That kind of generalisation can be damaging.
It’s just how casual Asian is used. And this project is about interrogating the ways in which it can be powerful to be ‘Asian’, to use ‘Asian’, but also how it can be reductive.
Kimchi is one of the biggest Korean cultural exports. Do you think it’s understood in the UK?
Kimchi definitely put Korea on the map for sure. You can’t deny that. But I can’t passionately express enough how upsetting and damaging it is to watch people misrepresenting the process of kimchi making.
Yes, it's fermented food and you can come into in any way, and yes I love that you’re loving this! But maybe learn about it, understand the culture, and understand why it’s got such a strongly developed culture in Korea. And learn the process properly! I’ve seen other people use smoked paprika. I’m all about accessibility, of course you have to modify and suit your locality, but before you change anything it’s important for you to fully understand how it's done. Adapt it, but don’t call it kimchi.
I think the more popular something gets the more potential there is for it to be misunderstood, and that’s the trade-off.
For whatever reason, people say bad press is still good press. I always feel sorry for how many times Italian pasta has been bastardised! Italian grandmothers must be so upset… but on the flip side, it gets people talking.
Anyway. How shall we eat your cabbage?
I’ll serve it with rice. It’s really delicious with sausages as well. I’ve had it before where I didn’t fancy mash; I just wanted to have smoked sausages and vegetables. But my favourite way of eating it is to snack on the leftovers straight out of the container, straight out of the fridge the next day. The flavour changes so much and it’s a lot sweeter.
Who would you invite to snack on your cabbage?
I would love to invite Diana Henry. Her book How To Eat A Peach really inspired me, and I know she likes cabbages.