Tteokbokki

Tteokbokki has always been counter food: a wide tray where the sauce reduces all day and the rice cakes sit in it, absorbing as they go. The sauce is gochujang, sugar and stock, with fish cake, boiled eggs and spring onion cooking alongside. Variants have multiplied — clear broth, soy-based, cream-based — and they taste very little like one another.

It is served by the portion in a bowl or a tray and shares itself, since everything sits in the same sauce. Rather than eating the fritters beside it dry, most people dip them, or push them under entirely to soften. What is left at the bottom matters as much as the rest: it gets finished with rice or a sheet of gimbap.