Chungcheongnam-do Food & Traditional Cuisine

Chungcheong food has a reputation within Korea for being plain, mild and honest — less salty than the south, less sweet than Seoul, and short on flourish.

That understatement is deliberate and it suits the ingredients, which are the point. The tidal flats produce some of the best shellfish in the country: blue crab, clams, oysters, razor clams and octopus, harvested by hand at low tide. The plains grow rice, and the hills grow chestnuts, persimmons, strawberries around Nonsan and the ginseng of Geumsan.

Soups and stews carry the everyday cooking — clam broth, soybean paste stew — and are meant to taste clean rather than complex.

The province also makes good makgeolli, the cloudy rice beer, and traditional soy and bean pastes.

Ganjang gejang is the dish worth travelling for: raw blue crab cured in seasoned soy sauce for a few days until the flesh turns silky and the roe sets. It is served cold and eaten with the fingers, and the shell is filled with rice at the end. Seosan and the west coast towns are the place for it.

Kkotgetang, a blue crab stew with vegetables and chilli paste, the cooked counterpart.

Samgyetang, a whole young chicken stuffed with rice, ginseng and jujube and simmered, eaten in the hottest weeks of summer on the principle of treating heat with heat — and best here, where the ginseng comes from.

Eoriguljeot, oysters salted and fermented with chilli powder, a Seosan speciality eaten in small quantities with rice, alongside raw oysters from the flats between autumn and spring.

Byeongcheon sundae, blood sausage from a village near Cheonan that has made it for generations, served in a soup.

Also: Hodu-gwaja, the walnut cakes invented in Cheonan and sold at every station; and Nonsan strawberries in spring.

Five-day markets are the province’s food institution. Country towns hold a market on fixed dates — every fifth day — when producers bring vegetables, dried fish, ginseng and livestock, and stalls cook on the spot. Geumsan’s ginseng market and the Seosan and Hongseong markets are the ones to look for.

Eating shellfish on the coast usually means choosing from tanks and having it cooked in the room behind; the jogae gui shellfish barbecue at a table grill is the standard coastal meal.

Side dishes arrive unasked and are refilled free; leaving them untouched is normal and no insult.

Drinking etiquette: pour for others and not yourself, hold the glass with two hands when an older person pours, and turn away slightly when drinking with seniors.

Templestay meals are silent, vegetarian and eaten to the last grain.

Korea does not make wine in quantity, but Chungcheongnam-do has a serious traditional alcohol culture and one drink of its own.

Makgeolli, unfiltered rice beer, is the country drink: milky, lightly fizzy, around six per cent, and traditionally drunk from a brass bowl after work in the fields. Several small breweries in the province have revived proper single-origin versions using local rice and wild nuruk starter, which taste nothing like the mass-market product.

Insamju, ginseng liquor, is made around Geumsan, which has been the centre of the Korean ginseng trade for some five hundred years and holds the national market. A whole root in the bottle is the usual presentation.

Fruit wines from local produce — bokbunja from black raspberry, and persimmon and plum wines — are made in small quantities across the province.

Soju is the everyday spirit everywhere in Korea, and distilled traditional soju from small producers is a different and far better drink than the green-bottle version.