Jjimdak찜닭

Thanks to its name, jjimdak (찜닭) is easy to mistake for an age-old traditional dish, but it was actually born in the 1980s. According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, its birthplace was the "fried chicken alley" inside Gu Market, a traditional market in Andong, North Gyeongsang Province. In the early to mid-1980s, shops there wanted something different from greasy fried chicken, so they began selling chicken cooked with glass noodles, vegetables, chili flakes and soy sauce.

The dish took its present form in the late 1980s, when potatoes, carrots, onions, cabbage and corn syrup were added to create its sweet-salty flavor. Despite the jjim ("steamed") in its name, it is not steamed at all: it is stir-fried and simmered over high heat in a large pan. One explanation holds that the name came from the steamed chicken Andong's chicken shops used to sell for ancestral rites.

Jjimdak caught on as a cheap meal in Andong's university district in the mid-1990s, and after it reached Seoul in 2000 it became a nationwide craze. Andong's higher profile after Queen Elizabeth II's visit in 1999 is said to have helped too. Around 2004, as shops renamed themselves from "so-and-so Tongdak (whole chicken)" to "so-and-so Jjimdak," the fried chicken alley became Jjimdak Alley.