A Mouthful of Stars: A Constellation of Favorite Recipes from My World Travels

By Kim Sunee

The acclaimed author of Trail of Crumbs shares recipes and stories from her many culinary adventures in this beautifully illustrated cookbook.

From Seoul to New Orleans, Provence, and beyond, Kim Sunee has spent her life exploring the world and its many cuisines. In A Mouthful of Stars, she shares her interpretation of some of her favorite recipes and cooking discoveries from her many travels.

Recipes range from Tuscan crostini di fegatini to Louisiana dirty rice, traditional North African dishes, and favorites from the years she spent in Provence and Paris. Each one tells a story of discovery and new horizons, of cherished togetherness, or replenishing solitude. A Mouthful of Stars is a culinary journey celebrating the author’s time in many lands and cooking in many kitchens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781449451677

Book preview

seoul

Bottoms-Up Rice

Quick Pickled Fennel

Pork Belly Korean-Style BBQ

Basic Fresh Kimchi

Samgaetong (Ginseng Chicken Soup)

Back to Heaven Quince Tea

Sticky Rice with Persimmon and Sesame

chapter one

silkworms, flying pasta, and two-two fried chicken

I’m sitting in the seventeenth floor club-level lounge of the Grand Hyatt Seoul. The hotel, with its deep waterfalls and spa, is a calming refuge built high on Mount Namsan, overlooking the bustling streets of the Itaewon district just below and the Han River beyond. I wonder, of the 10 million people in this city, is there anyone out there who remembers me—who knows my true birth date or recalls the first word I ever pronounced?

Since my arrival back in Seoul, I’ve been the first guest in the club lounge for breakfast, as it has been difficult to sleep for more than three hours a night with jet lag and the sheer emotional exhaustion of being back in this city. I am here not only for the Korean language edition of Trail of Crumbs but also because Roy, a Korean filmmaker who studied film at UC Santa Cruz, has been documenting my visit as an orphan returning home. I am fortifying myself now with lightly smoked salmon, toast, pumpkin porridge, and Solomon’s root tea—a nutty, woodsy aromatic that I have come to associate with early mornings here in Korea.

In a few hours, Roy is coming to pick me up to tour the city, which I hope includes eating; I am craving the flavors of Korean street food. Even during my first brief and disquieting return journey in 1994, I found the food wholly satisfying; fulfilling in many ways that the country and people were not at the time.

Soon-ay, he calls me in a rush, hugging me close; he has become a brother and Sherlock Holmes in this mystery we are trying to unravel. We must return to the market where you may have been abandoned. I have Mike, my translator, here to come with us. He explains that after some investigating, he and Mike decided we should visit Sinpo Market since it is the only one near the Star of the Sea orphanage—the only concrete place noted on my adoption papers.

I’ve asked my new friend Lee Herrick, a poet who lives in California, to accompany me on this excursion. Lee and I corresponded for months before meeting on the first evening of my arrival in this country—where we were both born and both abandoned.

As we arrive in the port city of Incheon, I am reminded how much port cities have always fascinated me, with their ships and promise of new cargo; the temporary feeling of being anchored; the illusion that we are moored.

When the camera starts rolling, Lee and I, taking some long-forgotten, subconscious cue, follow the trail from one end of the market to the other. We are a makeshift Hansel and Gretel lost in a bazaar instead of a wilderness, making our way through the fish and vegetable stalls, tasting everything we can along the way: gumbo-like stews, steamed pork buns, and rice cakes in a sweet and spicy red sauce thick as blood. The elders of the area offer to help, scribbling maps of where to go, and offering advice on how best to find the way home.

A few days after the visit to the market, Roy, who has spent thirty-six hours editing, calls to say he is coming to the hotel to watch the documentary debut nationwide with me and my new friends, interpreters Won and Seung-Hee.

Soon-ay, Roy says, before hanging up, I have to tell you something. Someone who thinks he is your brother is coming, too. No worries. He has a real job, is a nice man, and wants to meet you.

Roy goes on to explain that the man, Dong-Il, is vice-president of a company that lends ships to port cities around the world, and that he had originally planned on meeting me the day I was scheduled to appear on a show called I Miss You, where orphans try to reunite with their birth families. Since my appearance was postponed, Dong-Il contacted the KBS network and they connected him with Roy, who invited Dong-Il to watch the documentary with us.

At 5 p.m., I rush to the hotel lobby and immediately spot him; not because we look alike, but because I recognize the longing and anticipation in the way he stands there, unsure. Hand in pocket, hand out of pocket, smooth down the tie.

I am Dong-Il, he nods and smiles warmly. I can’t help myself. I reach out and embrace him.

Dong-Il lowers his head and hands me a gift—a black Mont Blanc pen with the words Missing You engraved along the side.

Even if we are not brother and sister, he says gently, someone is missing you all these years.

I look at him, unable to speak but wanting to say: Yes, something has been missing. I thank Dong-Il and we, along with Roy, Won, Seung-Hee, and Lee, squeeze into my hotel room to watch the documentary. Luckily, one wall of large floor-to-ceiling windows offers some sense of relief, because we can look out to the river and the city when scrutinizing one another’s faces for something familiar becomes too much.

Over room service beers and champagne, Dong-Il explains that if I am the little sister, the lost one as she is called in the family, then I was not abandoned by his mother and father. I was possibly abducted and then abandoned or lost by the abductors. His mother has been searching for the lost daughter for 35 years and took a DNA test five years ago, thinking she might have found the Lost One. No matter what may come of this meeting, what happened to them is heartbreaking and reminds me, once again, that my story of loss and abandonment is not unique.

Dong-Il is tall and handsome, with an eagerness to please that is both charming and unsettling, revealing a sense of longing to be connected that is so familiar to me.

After watching the documentary, Dong-Il’s sister calls and says: I watched, too. She sounds like us. Don’t force her, but ask if she will take a DNA test.

Roy’s documentary airs to an audience of about 6 million. While it brilliantly captures my love for food and travel and the beginnings of my search for a birth family, there is no record of all that happened as a result, including the phone calls from families claiming me as theirs, and how I keep extending my stay in Seoul as new clues hint at why I was left behind. During press conferences for my book, I am told again how there were so many children abducted in the early 1970s; that it’s very possible that I was really lost or kidnapped and not abandoned. Later I will think about this often and wonder how I might have to reshape my life minus the abandonment issues.

After my very last book interview, Roy calls to say that he has set up a DNA test for me. Dong-Il drives Won, who is kind enough to act as interpreter again, and me, negotiating the Friday afternoon streets of the city at top speed to Seoul University Hospital. I sign papers, and the rest is a blur. While Dong-Il and I make small talk about his job, there is some commotion about how Dong-Il’s mother left her DNA at the hospital five years prior when searching for the Lost Daughter and so only I need to give blood.

As the vice president in charge of the transportation division of his company, Dong-Il visits port cities around the world. We discover that we were both recently in New Orleans and stayed at the same hotel on the same day. We could have easily crossed paths as strangers in the lobby, the bar, or the elevator; now I’m waiting to see if he’s my brother.

After, back at the hotel, with Lee in the lobby bar, Dong-Il explains that he and his family discussed the possibility of you not being Lost One, because, he explains solemnly, then smiles, no one is good cook in family. He laughs and says that, luckily, he married a woman who can cook. I appreciate his attempt at levity.

We order fresh fruit juice and beer, and as evening encroaches, we move on to $30 glasses of Veuve Clicquot. We toast to the story of life; to the possibility of similar bloodlines and markers; to the hope that our temporary family will become something more permanent.

I study Dong-Il as he glances every so often out over the city and takes a deep breath. When he catches me watching him, he smiles quickly and stares at me with sincere tenderness. I want to recognize myself in the shape of his eyes; lodge momentarily in the sparseness of his brow, the dark sheen of his hair; and mimic the deep, rich tones of his voice. We are, for the moment, connected.

Maybe you are home, he tells me, reading my thoughts. He looks at the crease in my left elbow, where the cotton pokes out of the blood-crusted bandage. Sister, I don’t want you to be sad if we are not blood. I want to be your brother. I am your brother, no matter what blood says. We can choose home. We can choose family.

Soon it will be my last evening in Seoul, a rainy Sunday; Roy and my friends and I will meet for a farewell meal at a barbecue joint near Itaewon. Dong-Il will drive from his in-laws’ house an hour south, wondering, hoping as I am, if this might be the beginning of many meals together. My editor and the foreign rights manager from Minumsa, my Korean publisher, both come and offer gifts of homemade plum syrup, a silk Korean apron, and beautiful handmade notebooks. Roy’s wife and children are there, and so are Won, Seung-Hee, and Lee. We sit around the hot domed grill, steam rising between us as we devour juicy pork belly wrapped in sesame leaves, bowls of cold buckwheat noodles, and kimchi fried rice. We toast one another with soju and drink until our eyes shine bright and our hearts fill with the notion that we are somehow a family. Later, after I’ve returned to the United States, Roy will call, a rare sadness in his voice, to tell me that the blood test was deemed inconclusive and that I will have to return to continue the