Egg Droop Soup

For some time now I have quietly marveled at the profusion of eggs in this country: routinely sold by the three dozen in industrial-sized square blocks with egg-shaped plastic coverings and twine tying it all up like a present, for ease of carriage. Not only are they so abundant on grocery store shelves, they are just as numberless in Korean cuisine. They appear in anything from the topping on bokumpap, to a hard-boiled side dish for famous Korean noodles. You even find them resting on the side of the road to be used for a street stand's frying batter.

Sometimes the eggs you are served come with runny yolks, as is regularly the case with bibimpap. The agassi brings out your steel bowl filled with slices of carrots and cucumber, crumbles of meat and kim, and usually a heaping pile of steamed bean sprouts, all strategically balanced atop a generous helping of piping hot rice. And there in the middle of the vegetation is a freshly fried egg, smiling sunny-side-up just for you. Sometimes they come as a side dish to your som-gup-sal--a half-scrambled, half poached watery quiche that you devour as you wait for your barbecued pork to finish crisping. Yet despite their various forms of stage presence in the Land of the Morning Calm, I have never seen eggs served raw. That is, until yesterday.

Since graduating our last class of kindergarten students two weeks ago, Teacher Grace and I have become accustomed to going out to lunch; yesterday we decided on a restaurant on the first floor that our cook had recommended for its excellent bean-sprout-and-rice soup. "Kongnamul-guk-pap dugae chuseyo," Grace asked the waitress as we sat down. I noticed the Korean news was on, blaring from a T.V. mounted on the far wall just past Grace's head, and we chatted about recent international events until our food arrived.

The waitress came back minutes later and set two stone bowls of steaming rice stew in front of us, along with four small plates of side dishes, a stay-fresh glass container of dried kim, and two small steel bowls that held one egg each. The pudgy, yellow yolks still swam unbroken in their protein juice, uncooked but for the thin opaque layer delicately coating the bottom of the dish. I wondered if she had simply cracked the eggs into the bowls while the bowls were still hot.

In an overflow of Korean, the waitress began to explain her method: spoon some steamy broth into the egg-bowl while adding generous helpings of kim shreds, stir, and jjajan! You now have egg soup. She proceeded to stir mine herself while Grace copied her lead, certain that I wouldn't know what I should do when served such a bowl of viscous creatine. I watched, partly awed and partly mortified, as the guk magically transformed the soupy substance into creamy flakes of egg-white.

By no means was it fully cooked, however. As I tentatively stuck my spoon into the concoction to sample its effects, I noticed unattractive, droopy chunks of sticky, still-raw protein swimming in the yellowy pool. The mixture tasted good: rich and creamy from the runny yolks, salty-tangy from the seaweed. Yet I couldn't help but note the reason for its being called soup in the first place--the liquefied state of an egg just cracked. The imagery was too much for me; I set the metal bowl aside to concentrate on my gukpap.

"She said to eat the egg first and then the soup," Grace commented as I returned to my main dish. "But I'm gonna put it in here." My co-worker then proceeded to pour the substance into her still-hot stone bowl, thereby cooking any remaining raw protein. Though it would have solved my egg dilemma, I myself couldn't follow her lead because the act would have violated my private food-law of never mixing dishes together. Instead, I happily savored my gukpap and left the colorfully-invented "egg droop soup" to await the dishwater alone.