In The Fourth Trimester, we ask parents: What meal nourished you after welcoming your baby? This month, it’s a steaming bowl of miyeokguk from Bon Appétit deputy food editor Hana Asbrink.
Four hundred and fifty. That’s the number of consecutive days I ate the same soup. Maybe it was more. I ate it in the morning. I ate it in the evening. I ate it, hands cupped around the bowl, on the most frigid of winter days. And I ate it, with sweat-beaded brows, on the most sweltering of summer ones. I never ate it in a box or with a fox, but almost always, I ate it still in pajamas. Doesn’t that count for something?
Miyeokguk, or Korean seaweed (miyeok) soup (guk), holds great significance in Korean culture. Legend has it whales and dolphins eat lots of seaweed after giving birth. Koreans traditionally eat miyeokguk for several months postpartum, as it’s believed to purify the blood, and encourage and enhance breast milk production. Beyond this time, miyeokguk is a birthday soup for Koreans, meant to be consumed for breakfast with a steaming bowl of rice as an homage to their mothers for giving birth to them.
After I had my daughter, my mother brought a thermos of homemade miyeokguk to the hospital, my first taste of non-cafeteria food. During those ensuing days and sleepless nights of recovery, miyeokguk served as a constant. While my bleary-eyed, bloated, still-bleeding self was waiting for my milk to come in—while riding the hormonal roller coaster into the world of the “new normal”—I could at least rely on starting each day with the same meal: miyeokguk, bap, and any assortment of banchan if my mother was around; if she wasn’t, just the soup and rice, and maybe some non-spicy kimchi.
This isn’t a common length. As custom dictates, I could have stopped eating miyeokguk after just a few weeks or months. But I made the tradition my own, committing to the ritual for as long as I breastfed my daughter. It was the comfort I needed when my mother was back in Korea, my husband back at work, and I was left alone to figure out how to stay nourished and keep my tiny new nugget alive.
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