Learning How to Cook with Graphic Novels
Cook Korean! By Robin Ha
The graphic novel Cook Korean! A Comic Book with Recipes by Robin Ha came into my hands in a rather interesting way. My mom had actually gotten it for me as a Valentine’s Day present because of my interest in South Korea, along with my hope to study abroad there in the upcoming fall, and really just the interest of food/cooking in general.
Ha’s work is based off of her childhood in South Korea and her mom making a rather broad assortment of food that she enjoyed. She moved to the United States when she was fourteen and didn’t really cook for herself until studying abroad in Italy, where she stayed with a host family and helped them prepare meals. That experience was when Ha decided that she wanted to learn how to cook and then realized that she wanted to learn the recipes her mom made during her childhood.
When she was a child, Ha knew that she wanted to work in the comics and illustration field. She realized that the best way for her, and hopefully others, to understand how to make these recipes was to write it in a form she knew well, comics.
Ha originally started posting the recipes to her Tumblr (http://banchancomic.tumblr.com/), where the recipes were described in two to three pages of bright visuals on how to make a specific meal or side dish. After creating a multitude of comics she decide to publish them in a physical format, Cook Korean!, and categorized the recipes based on their main ingredients/style of food.
I think that this format of learning is absolutely incredible, as well as highly accessible for many people. Ha provides many personal anecdotes from her childhood that people are able to more easily connect with, as well as create the character Dengki who guides the reader through each of the recipes, in addition to some of the history connected with particular foods.
Overall, this particular use of comics/graphic novels is by far vastly different than its more fantastical and fictitious counterpart. Instead of making it an otherworldly story that can inspire others to create stories, Ha is enabling her audience to learn how to cook Korean cuisine for themselves and learn about some of its history.
With most of her comics being based in recipes, it’s not really possible for her to drift too far away from the original dish as far as experimentation goes (in fictional comics this would be equivalent to going into a subplot from the main story arc). This especially not being remotely possible since she had to work and test all of these recipes out with the help of her mother before she chose to adapt them in comic format.
While Ha is not the only comic artist that has created recipe/food based work, Relish by Lucy Knisley is a very similar example, it is still an area of comics that hasn’t really been touched upon. I personally think that this style has the opportunity to get people of all ages interested in learning how to cook food for themselves, regardless of whether or not it’s familiar/unfamiliar cuisine. My hope is that this area will be expanded upon and gain more interest from people in the future, since it’s such a clever way to share various versions such an integral part of human life and culture.
