This month we had a cultural experience with Korean cuisine, which I was not familiar with although I was bred in Korea. Since Somyung had some sweet potatoes, we decided to cook sweet potato mattang (고구마 맛탕). Before we got started cooking, we made research on the history of mattang and sweet potato in Korea and how to actually cook it. Just like Jjajjangmyun(짜장면) and so many other ‘so-called’ Chinese food in Korea, mattang is in fact originated from China but localized to change a lot in Korea. Not surprisingly, all three countries, China, Korea, and Japan, have mattang (Chinese name: Basi) although there are some variations in recipes.
Simply put, mattang is a candied sugar potato with starch syrup while the original Chinese dish is candied with sugar. Firstly, we cut sweet potatoes into mouthful sizes and put them in water for ten minutes so that starch in sweet potatoes comes out because starch often makes dishes very sticky. Then we had to put them in the microwave for 4 minutes according to my recipe for amateur cooking. The alternative way is to steam the sweet potato slices, but we chose to do it in an easier way. After it was the most entertaining and yet dangerous part of the cooking process because we had to fry them, and I was afraid of hot crackling oil. However, we went through it without no one hurt, and we could smell cooked sweet potato slices. The last step was to make the sauce by mixing water, sugar, and mostly starch syrup. The result was a bit harder and stickier than we expected. Nevertheless, it was very tasty, and I was very glad that I could taste this in America as I missed this so much for so long time. I highly appreciated Somyung for offering a chance to us to cook food at her apartment and for getting the sweet potatoes for us.
Another memorable thing in the meetings this month was learning the bottom consonant (받침) in the hangul (한글) structure. As opposed to English, Korean has syllable and each syllable are made of hanguls, at least one consonant and one vowel and sometimes one more consonant, which I called the bottom consonant (받침). While initial consonants are pronounced as their own pronunciations, bottom consonants are more simplified so that there are only seven kinds of (consonant) pronunciations: ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄷ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, and ㅇ. The consonants that are excluded from the lists are ㅅ, ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅎ, and each of them is pronounced as [ㄷ], [ㄷ], [ㄷ], [ㄱ], [ㄷ], and [ㅂ] except ㅎ is often neglected. As one can realize from the last explanation, many of them are pronounced as [ㄷ]. However, Korean learners should consider when an earlier letter has a bottom consonant, the bottom consonant could affect the initial consonant of the next letter. For example, although 했 alone is pronounced as [핻], 했어(did, past tense of 해) is pronounced as [해써]. This happens because
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