kkori gomtang | From Korea With Love

My art teacher today was telling me about her weekend plans and how she put so much effort into making kkori gomtang (꼬리곰탕 ), or as we would call it: Oxtail Soup. Now what struck my interest in posting about this was the mere fact that to buy one, ONE, oxtail was 100,000 WON. That is roughly $100. ::choke:: In America, the price can range between $4 – $10 per pound, with most recipes calling for a few pounds. NEVER would you pay that much!

In Korea, beef is not as popular. On top of that, as my teacher put it, “The cow has only one tail”, and thus a unique piece to eat.

One story on the origin of Oxtail Soup is that during the French Revolution when the slaughterhouses sent the their hides to the tanneries without cleaning them, leaving on the tails. A French noble asked for a tail, which was willingly given to him, and he created the first oxtail soup. Soon, the tanners began charging for the tails because of the constant demand that had been created for them. The dish was supposedly introduced to England by French refugees from the ‘terror’.

This origin is news to me, what I had known came from American history and roots of oxtail in American slavery history. When the European slave trade began in the early 1400s, the diet of newly enslaved Africans changed on the long journeys from their homeland. As slaves, African-Americans would “make do” with the ingredients at hand. The fresh vegetables found in Africa were replaced by the throwaway foods from the plantation house. African American slaves also developed recipes which used discarded meat from the plantation, such as pig’s feet, beef tongue or tail, ham hocks, chitterlings (pig small intestines), pig ears, hog jowls, tripe and skin.

To learn more about Korean soups and the differences among them, wiki has a pretty good article describing them.