Here’s a little news to keep you warm this winter - despite the recession that grips this nation, sales of cooking equipment for use in outdoor stalls are quite brisk. Oden-cookers, “fish-bread” cookers, machines for cooking squid, trucks for delivering orders - if you just happened to work in factories producing these goods, your ship has come in. If you’re buying, however, and let it be known that the Marmot has always wanted to get into the p’ojangmach’a business, one should beware - the choices are difficult and many. One potential buyer complains:
There are so many kinds and so many prices… it’s complicated trying to choose. “Carp bread” (Kor: ingeo-bbang) are big, but since they are thin they get cold quickly if you don’t sell them, while “crucian carp bread” (Kor: pungeo-bbang) are small, but since they are fat they don’t cook well.
Dilemmas, dilemmas, dilemmas. However, here a piece advice - don’t invest in the “barrels for roasting sweet potatoes” industry. Laments Lee In-cheol, a 71 year-old seller of such barrels:
Roasted sweet potatoes used to be young man’s business, but are lots of young people doing it these days? And a barrel for roasting sweet potatoes only has a life of 1 year; in the past, business was quite brisk, but now, it’s completely dead.
Oh, the things you learn from the Chosun Ilbo’s Society section.
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Exercise your language skills and reap the rewards: try to convince your tongne’s pung?쨈-ppang maker to provide you with empty “fish-breads”. Run home. Slice them half-open, fill with Nutella chocolate paste, enjoy…
The difficult part is to get the ajumma/ajosshi to make some “plain” pung?쨈-ppang…
Rather than despite of the recession (the fish-shaped pastry business is booming), I’d say _because_ of the recession, as pung?쨈ppang (long live McCune-Reischauer) making is a sort of a marker of economically bad times. And by telling about it, Chosun was making a point…
Wonder if the price of those small trucks (ponggoch’a) has been rising, as I heard happened after the crash of ‘97.
Thanks for the p’ojangmach’a link!
Wow, Marmot…you work on your blog all day or what? Perhaps you shoud take a time out and visit one of them “chicken ranches” with a shopping window.
Don’t ask for an empty one, take a hershey bar and talk them into cooking that inside. We used to do that all the time.
i like po dukk. the cinnamon pancakes. the fist have red beans in them. i never understood why koreans put red beans in stuff. they put it in ice cream too. geez.
I’m not sure what you guys have against the red bean filling - I kind of like it, even in ice cream. Yummy!