Seolleongtang: A Bowl of Patience, Love, and Home

Seolleongtang: A Bowl of Patience, Love, and Home

When my wife was pregnant with our first child, there was really only one dish on my mind: seolleongtang. Like a lot of Korean families, we believed in the old idea that the right food could help both mother and baby — and seolleongtang, the milky ox-bone soup, was supposed to be one of the best things a woman could eat to recover after childbirth and to help with breastfeeding. I'd eaten it my whole life growing up in Korea without thinking twice about it. This was the first time I ever tried to make it myself, and I wanted to get it right for her.

There was just one problem. We were living in a small town in Massachusetts at the time, nowhere near a Korean grocery store, and beef bones — the right kind, for the right price, in the right quantity — were nowhere to be found. Bone marrow wasn't something most Americans were cooking with back then; it's trendy in restaurants now, but at the time it was practically invisible outside Korean markets. I called around, checked a few local butchers, came up empty. So one weekend I got in the car and drove almost four hours to New York, just to buy soup bones from a Korean grocery store there, and drove the four hours back. Looking back, I can hardly believe I did that for a pot of soup. But when you're missing the taste of home badly enough, four hours doesn't feel as long as it sounds.

There's an old Korean saying that good food comes from care and sincerity, and seolleongtang is probably the clearest proof of it I know. The bones have to be cleaned carefully, soaked to draw out the blood, rinsed more than once, then simmered for upward of ten hours. Somewhere around hour six or seven, almost as if it's rewarding your patience, the broth finally turns that deep milky white it's known for. Then the beef goes in, cooked slow until it's tender enough to pull apart. The seasoning, after all that work, is almost absurdly simple — just salt, pepper, chopped green onion, added at the table by whoever's eating it. Serve it with noodles, rice, and a side of kkakdugi, and that's the whole meal.

I set the first bowl in front of my wife sometime after midnight, once it was finally ready, and I remember watching her face while she took the first spoonful more than I remember the taste myself. I don't think I'd thought much about seolleongtang at all while I still lived in Korea — it was just always there, the way water is always there. It took leaving to notice it properly. It doesn't come at you with strong spices or a rich sauce or anything flashy on the plate. It just quietly fills you up, warms you from somewhere inside, and gets out of the way. Ten hours over a stove, a four-hour drive each way for the bones, all so it could taste like almost nothing had been done to it at all.

Our son was born a few months later. I still think about that pot every so often — not really the soup itself, but the drive there and back, and the way my wife looked down at that first bowl before she'd even picked up her spoon.

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