Ojingeo-bokkeum오징어볶음

Squid has been a familiar food in Korea for a very long time. Old texts usually wrote its name as ojeogeo (烏賊魚), and variants such as ojungeo and ojigeo were also in use. Jasan Eobo, a catalogue of marine life by the Joseon scholar Jeong Yak-jeon, cites a Chinese text to tell how the squid floats on the surface and, when a crow lands to peck at it, wraps it in its arms and drags it under to eat. Hence the name, read as "thief (賊) that preys on crows (烏)." It is a legend rather than real squid behavior.

Squid ink has its own tales. Jasan Eobo says that writing done in squid ink fades without a trace over time but reappears when dipped in seawater, and another classic, Jibong Yuseol, notes that because such writing vanished after some years, some people used it to deceive others. In earlier times squid was eaten raw or dried.

Curiously, North and South Korea use the words for squid and octopus differently. In the South, the ten-armed animal is ojingeo (squid) and the eight-armed one is nakji (small octopus), but in the North the South's ojingeo is called nakji. There is no clear record of when people began stir-frying squid in gochujang sauce to make ojingeo-bokkeum.