Kong-guksu콩국수

Soybeans have long sustained ordinary Korean tables. The scholar Yi Ik wrote in Seongho Saseol that fine grains and tasty dishes all went to the rich and powerful, while the poor kept themselves alive on beans alone. He went on to describe how to use them: grind the beans on a millstone to make tofu, and boil the leftover pulp into a soup that tastes wonderfully nutty.

A recipe for noodles in soybean broth appears in Siuijeonseo, a 19th-century cookbook: soak the beans, blanch them lightly, press them through a fine sieve, season with salt and add wheat noodles. It is almost exactly today's kong-guksu (콩국수). Most Korean noodle soups are served hot, but kong-guksu settled in as a summer treat, often with ice floating in the bowl.

How to season it is an old debate. Most regions add salt, as in the old recipe, but in the Jeolla provinces many people sweeten it with sugar, which tends to surprise visitors from elsewhere.