Happy Cruelest Month!

 

I wrote this article on 3^rd of April, which marks the bloodiest event in the period between the independence and Korean war.

Have you ever wondered why April is the cruelest month in the year? Well, I am familiar with this expression as I am a big fan of Eliot and read his “wasteland” many times.  And with Leo, we went to the park behind the city hall today, because of Leo’s health condition, he was not able to go to school and had been with me all day. Since it was the time long before the end of classes, no kid of his age was seen in the empty playground, seemed to be literally wasteland. In his poem, Thomas (Eliot) envisioned that our mundane life with funs quickly faded away and everything ended soon, leading him to write poem lamenting ephemeral existence. That’s my interpretation and as two of us stood there, watching myriad of fallen petals of cherry blossoms covered the ground, saddened, and decided to go somewhere else. Later we briefly visited rooftop café in the park to have Americano and a bottle of beverage, looking blue sky dotted with filaments of thin cloud.

Then in the evening, it was Leo who loves seafoods suggested to go to a restaurant to have cuttlefish dish and fried shrimps. Cuttlefish can be caught from April to July in the seas close to Korea, Japan, and China. Therefore, it is good time to have fresh cuttlefish in this month. As a type of cephalopod, it has armor-like bones, so its prefix of Korean name stems from the word armor (甲, pronunciation in Korean is ‘Gap’) and called gap-ogingeo, here ogingeo is squid in Korean. Having long, flat, calcareous bones in its body, it is different from boneless octopuses and small boneless squids.

Cuttlefish can be eaten as sashimi, and there are many other variations of the dish. Since the proportion of bones is quite large compared to the body volume, the amount of edible part is rather small because almost only the skin remains when sashimi is cooked with all other parts removed (see the last photo we took). However, compared to regular squid, the flesh is thicker, and the texture is chewy, so we enjoyed thinly sliced pieces of this cephalopod in our mouth. In addition, it is treated as a high-end food ingredient at a price that is ~3 times higher than that of regular squid in Korea. It is also known as good for stamina because of its high taurine content.

Cuttlefish can be cooked as stir-fried squid too and last time we went to Chinese style lamb skew restaurants, Leo ordered it. Generally speaking, unlike fried squid cuisines in Korea, those served in the local Chinese restaurants use soy bean sources instead of hot chili sources, making them better for foreigners to eat without difficulties. Because of his young tender age, Leo also couldn’t eat too spicy foods thus he loves soy source fried cuttlefish. In Italy and Spain, people enjoy eating calamari, a species like cuttlefish. I had such kind of Mediterranean style cuttlefish fries and pastas in an Italian restaurant just below the where I lived in Atlanta. The chef there was really the man and knew how to prepare many tentacled critters from sea.

The bones of cuttlefish are made of calcites, which is the component of shells. I have memory of my grandma used them to cure my minor cuts and other small wounds. It is known that bones of this animal are famous medicinal ingredients in traditional medicine because it is known to be effective to stop bleeding. I remember that she crushed cuttlefish bones to make powder and sprayed it on my wounds. It was also known as medicinal materials for eye inflammations, but I didn’t use bone powders for this purpose.

Well…let’s finish cuttlefish story here, we are near the end of the first week of so-called cruelest month of the year and I wish your merry cruelest month!