Food for Thought: What You Find Down the Recipe Rabbit Hole

How I got obsessed with a beet salad and learned about an interesting chapter of history.

I have been getting lost down the Internet Rabbit Hole since I sat in front of my crummy 486 computer, complete with 4MB of RAM, in my dorm room at the University of Waterloo.  My blazing-fast (ha!) dial up connection was complemented by a creaky UNIX interface.  There really wasn’t a World Wide Web to speak of but there was Usenet (is that still a thing?) and long evenings in front of the screen frequently led in interesting directions, including a few that wouldn’t have met with parental approval.

But Usenet has long since given way to the web, and the web interface to social media, and my nearly 7000 poorly-organized pins on Pinterest are a testament to how non-linear the Internet can be.  Most of those pins are recipes too, so you would think by now I would have something for every possible occasion.

But a couple of weeks ago there was a sale on beets at the grocery store and I ended up with 20 pounds. While I do like beets this was a bit much even for me. So I have been working beets into everything: roasted beets, beet bread (it’s pink!), beet soup, beet salad, beet pasta….it’s a long list, but I was still running out of ideas.

I had planned a Korean-inspired dinner for my daughter, my Dad, and my brother so I figured it was worth a look to see if beets featured in any Korean recipes.  I found a recipe for a Korean-Russian raw beet salad and, lucky me, I had everything on hand. 

Check it out:

This recipe is cool for several reasons: 

• It makes a lot, making the grated/shredded beet mess worth your while. 

• It lasts for days in the fridge and only gets tastier with time. 

• It is all winter vegetable/pantry ingredients so you need not spend a fortune on over-priced and out-of-season stuff. 

• It has an interesting flavour combination – beet and coriander, which I wouldn’t have picked on my own but really works.

• It goes with anything – roasted meats, tofu, over a salad, grain bowl, etc.

• It has a little cheffy technique: heating the oil, sweating the onions and toasting the spices.

• And best of all, it’s really tasty and pretty!

But the Korean-Russian angle got me curious – how did that combination come about? A bit more Googling and some digging led me to some fascinating articles about the Koryo-Saram people, a cultural group evolved from Stalin’s expulsion of Korean migrants from Russia to Central Asia in the late 1930s.  Their cuisine evolved with the availability of ingredients, leading to food quite different from what we expect from the now-trendy Korean cuisine.  Very little of the cuisine has made it to North America but there is at least one place in Brooklyn NY serving it up, which means I now have yet another place to check out next time I visit New York. You can read more about it and the Koryo-Saram story here.

Some notes on the recipe:

• Use your food processor (if you have one) to shred the beets.  It’s still going to be a gosh-awful mess on your hands when you peel them, but it is worth it.  Wear gloves if you prefer, or be like me and accept the mess as part of the fun.

• The recipe doesn’t specify what kind of vinegar to use, so I used red wine vinegar.  It’s perfect.

• I didn’t have whole/cracked coriander so I used ground (about 1 ½ teaspoons).  It works.

• Do NOT add the coriander and black pepper until you take the oil/onions off the heat.  The hot oil activates the fat-soluble aromatic compounds in the spices as they toast, but you also risk burning them if you leave the pan over direct heat for more than a few seconds.

• A little bit of sesame seed makes a nice garnish, but don’t throw on other stuff like parsley or chives for colour or just because.  It really doesn’t need anything.

• It’s good the day you make it, but gets better in the fridge.  Seriously.

As a culture we are spending more and more time talking about where our food comes from.  We throw around words like “local”, “organic”, “free range” and wonder whether our meat was happy before it was killed.  But sometimes it’s worthwhile to think about not only the origin of ingredients, but the origins of recipes.  Few cuisines in the world are entirely untouched by trade, colonialism, displacement, or travel.  If you are looking for it you can taste history in every bite.

A trip down the Rabbit Hole provides some food for thought indeed.