Sunday, September 28, 2008

Korean Food 102

Dishes, that is, not a course number. This week's Joongang Daily reported that Agriculture Ministry will unify the English names of 102 Korean dishes. Since I know everyone has been waiting for this, I wrote to the reporter, and was sent a list of these 102 foods and their new names.

I apologize for the poor formatting. I had hoped to get a link to the government's website, instead all I got was an MS Word file. I was going to format it myself into a simple HTML table, but I ran into problems. Normal text filtering and processing utilities (grep, sed, head, tail, sort, etc...) don't work well with Korean (unicode) text. At least the simple versions I have on my PC don't. I was able to convert "text to table" in Word, then after a little simple editing, save it as an HTML file. But it's ugly. Sorry.

I was too busy formatting, and haven't studied the list closely. A couple of things did jump out at me, however. Changing "Fermented Soy Bean Paste Soup" to just "Soy Bean Paste Soup" is a step in the right direction. I also noted that The Stumbling Mother's favorite Korean dish, "salted pollack intestines", didn't make the list.

BTW, I did search for this list on the Korean Agriculture Ministry's English Language website. Unlike some English language websites of Korean organizations, this one seemed reasonably up-to-date (Latest news was 2 Sep, less than 1 month old). While I didn't see the list of 102 foods, there were some interesting pages on a few main Korean foods (look under the "Seasoning & Style of Korean Food" tab).

Speaking of Korean foods, I've always relied on this webpage for a fairly comprehensive list of Korean dishes and a description of each. Many of the entries have accompanying photos, and there is an attempt to guage the spiciness of each dish. I don't think there are 100 dishes, but well over 50 it looks like (I'm too lazy to count them).

1 comment:

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