culture

From olden times, the Koreans have regarded samgyethang as one of the best health-promoting foods in the hottest period of summer along with tangogi soup.

This traditional food is associated with a legend telling about a boy’s filial devotion to his mother.

Once upon a time, a tender-hearted boy put all his mind and efforts into nursing his mother, but there was no improvement.

One day, a doctor told him that his mother would recover from the illness if she took a soup prepared by boiling down a chicken stuffed with wild insam dug in a remote mountain.

The boy went up and down lots of mountain ranges and finally found a wild insam which was very rare to make samgyethang.

His mother recovered her health after taking it.

As a result, the food came to be called hyosongthang, a soup associated with the deep filial devotion of children to their parents.

Afterwards, insam had been widely cultivated and used to boil the soup instead of wild insam. Because it had been well-known as a blood-making, invigorating material from olden times, having clear effects on the restoration of energy and treatment of diseases.

Samgyethang is made by stewing in a stone pot or earthenware bowl a four- to five-month-old chicken stuffed with astragalus, dates and glutinous rice along with insam in its stomach.

It is brought to the boil over strong heat and then stewed over low fire for about an hour. Then the ingredients of insam come out to blend in well with different components of chicken. The aroma wafting at that time stimulates your appetite.

You can eat it intact or its juice, and black chickens are believed to have a higher medicinal efficacy.

It is best as a nourishing food when you have lost appetite, are suffering from anaemia or are in poor health.

In midsummer days, samgyethang is widely used in Korean families in order to provide their members with adequate nourishment and maintain health under intense heat.

It is a local speciality in the Kaesong area, where insam is widely cultivated.