Haejangguk (Hangover Soup)

Haejangguk — also called sulguk, "drink soup" — is the general name for soups eaten to settle the stomach after drinking, usually with rice in an earthenware bowl. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture finds a prototype in the late-Goryeo Chinese conversation primer Nogeoldae, which mentions a sobering soup (seongjutang) of meat broth with finely sliced meat, noodles, Sichuan pepper and green onion. Joseon cookbooks do not record it, but late-Joseon paintings and writings do: Shin Yun-bok's tavern scene shows a hostess ladling soup from a cauldron for idle young men.

The encyclopedia also cites the nineteenth-century Haedong jukji on hyojonggaeng, "dawn-bell soup": in Gwangju, south of Seoul, cooks simmered cabbage hearts, bean sprouts, mushrooms, beef ribs, sea cucumber and abalone all day, wrapped the pot in cotton and sent it overnight to the capital, where it reached high officials' houses still warm at the dawn bell — a gift that may have doubled as a bribe. Old Seoul haejangguk was a beef-bone broth lightly thickened with doenjang, simmered with bean sprouts, radish and cabbage and then seonji; Cheongjin-dong was famous for it.

Folklorist Song Hwa-seop, in the Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture, tells a more modern story. He argues that the name itself is recent, and traces the dish to the gukbap of Joseon market taverns and then to the wholesale markets founded from the mid-1950s, where porters ate soup and rice before dawn. From the late 1960s, when the night curfew lifted at 4 a.m., crowds leaving Seoul nightclubs headed for these soup houses, and the market workers' breakfast became the drinker's cure. He is blunt that the hangover-curing power is not scientific; the comfort is the hot broth.

• Blood curd is exceptionally rich in iron: by the MFDS analysis, one bowl of seonji-haejangguk holds several times an adult's daily iron requirement.
• The bowl is high in protein and low in fat, and the cabbage greens, radish and sprouts add vegetables.
• Its fame as a hangover cure is cultural rather than proven; the folk encyclopedia calls the curative claim unscientific and credits the comfort of hot broth.

• Seoul seonji-haejangguk: beef-bone broth with doenjang, cabbage greens (ugeoji), bean sprouts, radish and blocks of seonji.
• Ppyeo-haejangguk: bone soup with meaty back bones; the folk encyclopedia traces a Seoul beef-bone version to soup houses around Yongsan's Yongmun market and Cheongjin-dong.
• Jeonju kongnamul-gukbap: bean sprouts, rice and kimchi in an earthenware pot, often with an egg, seasoned at the table with salted shrimp.
• Other bases: dried or winter-dried pollock (bugeo, hwangtae), freshwater snails (olgaengi, daseulgi), acorn jelly and dried radish greens all have their own hangover soups.
• Uljin: on the east coast, the encyclopedia notes a cold version — squid sliced as thin as noodles, seasoned, then covered with cold water and ice.