Food, care, and self-punishment

Food in Winter in Sokcho is never only sustenance: it is work the narrator can control, a language of care that others may refuse, and the setting for bodily distress she struggles to govern. The kitchen gives her a domain and a craft, yet eating with her family repeatedly turns appetite into a source of shame and self-punishment. Across these contrasting scenes, cooking connects competence and intimacy while exposing how easily care becomes entangled with scrutiny.

The kitchen as a domain of skill

The narrator describes the guest-house kitchen as her domain. She says that Old Park took time to get used to her cooking but did not interfere, and she resists her mother’s suspicion that the work is keeping her from eating enough. Her assurance is concrete: since starting at the guest house, she has been consuming large amounts of toast and milky coffee each morning. The kitchen is therefore not simply a place where she serves others; it is one of the few spaces in which she can make decisions and defend her own account of her body and routine.

Her preparation of a small-Octopus dish shows that authority in the kitchen is practical and exacting. She browns the Octopus with shallots, soy sauce, sugar, and diluted bean paste, lowers the heat to keep it from drying, and adds sesame and slices of sticky rice cake once the sauce has thickened. The sequence reflects attention to texture and timing. As she starts cutting carrots, their ridged surfaces merge, in the reflection of the knife, with the flesh of her fingers. The image brings food and body abruptly together: the hand that prepares a meal is also vulnerable to the blade.

When Yan Kerrand enters for water and watches her work, the narrator loses concentration and cuts her palm. Blood wells onto the carrots and hardens into a brownish crust. Yan Kerrand presses his handkerchief to the wound and urges her to be more careful. The small injury makes the kitchen’s ordinary labor an occasion for contact and care, but that care is brief and practical; the scene does not turn cooking into uncomplicated intimacy.

Family meals and the loss of control

A meal with her mother at a stall near the port makes eating a much more fraught activity. Her mother orders a vegetable and seafood pancake and local makgeolli. Before eating, the narrator measures the size of each mouthful and tries to calculate how much she will consume. At the same time, her mother praises the colors of her dress and says she will need to watch her figure to fit into it again for the wedding. The remark places food beside the expectation of bodily discipline before the meal has properly begun.

The narrator then eats and drinks faster and faster, swirling the rice wine with her chopsticks and gulping it down. As her mother talks about the late fish catch and the lack of Fugu for the coming Seollal meal, the narrator stops listening and loses control over her eating. Her mother tops up her bowl, smiles, and orders another pancake even as the narrator feels sick. When she coughs, makgeolli spills onto her coat; her mother dabs at it with a napkin already used to wipe grease from her mouth, leaving the patch smelling of sour milk. The narrator continues eating until she is barely able to swallow, then staggers back to the guest house with her stomach distended. Her mother calls her lovely when she eats, but the narrator’s tears and physical discomfort make clear that praise does not relieve the compulsion.

The contrast between mother and daughter is sharpened by the mother’s specialized knowledge of Fugu. She is the only fishmonger in Sokcho licensed to prepare it, and the narrator explains that its organs contain lethal toxins while the translucent flesh can be made into an artful dish by someone with the right skill. At the family meal, the mother carefully removes the poisonous intestines, ovaries, and liver without piercing them. The narrator watches but has never been allowed to handle Fugu. Her mother’s expertise thus supports the family’s hospitality and commands respect, while also marking a boundary around the daughter’s access to skilled work.

Seollal, scrutiny, and the family table

When Seollal arrives, the narrator makes Tteokguk for the guest house and walks over to tell Yan Kerrand that the holiday will close everything. He has already stocked up on instant noodles and declines her cooking. Stung by another refusal, she asks why he never tries it; he says he does not like spicy food, and she points out that her Tteokguk is not spicy. The exchange is brief, but it sets a recurring pattern: she offers food as a way to care for him and to make contact, while his refusal leaves the offer unanswered.

The narrator’s family gathering makes the care implicit in preparing food harder to separate from humiliation. Her aunt arrives heavily made up in a tailored suit and laughs at the traditional outfits worn by the narrator and her mother. The mother forces a laugh, then arranges cushions on the tiled kitchen floor with her daughter. The aunt praises the Fugu sashimi, which she says she does not trust Seoul chefs to prepare, but questions the grayish color of the Octopus dish. The mother blames the narrator for piercing the ink sac and says she cannot be trusted with a knife. The meal displays the mother’s technical command and the aunt’s appetite for judgment in the same scene; the narrator’s contribution is reduced to a visible mistake.

The scrutiny extends from her cooking to her body. The aunt squeezes the narrator’s buttocks and thighs, proposes to take charge of her wedding clothes and makeup, criticizes her glasses, and offers to pay for an operation to change them. Her mother objects that her daughter is lovely as she is and needs no alteration. Yet the table remains a difficult place for the narrator: when the aunt asks why she is stuffing herself, the narrator tightens her fingers around her spoon. Her mother protests that the remark should not be made when her daughter is, for once, eating. The narrator leaves before the family goes to the cemetery, walks back when there are no buses, and holds her arms around her painful abdomen. The meal ends not in shared comfort but in another episode of overeating and bodily distress.

Feeding as care, refusal, and self-punishment

The pattern reaches a more devastating point after the narrator speaks to Yan Kerrand about his imagined hero. She returns through the alley to the kitchen, unwraps a sausage her mother has given her, and crouches on the floor to eat frantically. She describes filling a body that stifles her, continuing until she cannot breathe and feels more disgusted with herself, then collapsing as her stomach heaves and brings up bile onto her thighs. Food, in this episode, no longer appears as a carefully prepared offering or a shared meal. It becomes the means of an assault on the body she feels trapped in.

Old Park finds her in the kitchen beneath the green corridor light. He looks at the scene, puts his arms around her, pats her shoulder, wraps her in his coat, and leads her to her room without speaking. His response is care expressed through touch, warmth, and quiet action rather than advice or food. The contrast matters: the narrator’s eating has become physically destructive, but the immediate response is not to judge or correct her. It is to get her safely back to her room.

Later, she tells Yan Kerrand that she would like him to taste her cooking. He is staring at the washing machine and seems absorbed elsewhere; after a pause, he agrees. The moment does not establish that he has eaten the food or that their distance has ended. Instead, it gives her offer a tentative opening after earlier refusals. Across the book’s meals and kitchen scenes, food can sustain work, display expertise, intensify family scrutiny, or carry a bid for closeness. Its meaning depends on who prepares it, who controls the conditions of eating, and whether the offer is met with attention or refused.