Hotteok호떡

Hotteok (호떡) is believed to have arrived in Korea in the 1880s with Chinese immigrants. Their numbers grew after Joseon and Qing China signed a trade agreement in 1882, and the pancake most likely came with them, although no record pins down the exact date. By 1889 a hotteok shop run by an immigrant from Guangdong was already open in Seoul, and by October 1930 there were 1,139 Chinese-run hotteok shops across the country.

Those shops kept thriving after 1945 and through the 1950s and '60s, but when steamed buns (hoppang) became a craze in the 1970s, hotteok lost much of its shine. The sweet version you find on the street today is a Korean take on the dish the Chinese community brought over. The flat round kind with brown sugar inside was once known as danghwaso (糖火燒).

In Busan, the ssiat hotteok ("seed hotteok") of Nampo-dong is said to have begun on the neighborhood's streets in the 1980s. The pancake is fried in oil, split open and packed with sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and peanuts, which also stop the melted sugar from running out. Another story says that refugees who gathered in Busan during the Korean War made hotteok with all sorts of grain seeds.