Fish Cake SoupOdeng Tang

In winter in Korea, the odeng tang cart is unavoidable and essential. You smell the anchovy broth from half a block away — savory and slightly oceanic — and you stop. You pay for a skewer, receive a small cup of hot broth alongside it, and you eat standing up on the sidewalk in the cold, sipping the broth between bites of the rubbery, satisfying fish cake.

My Romanian friend Andrei came to Seoul in January and experienced his first odeng tang cart on his second day. He had never encountered fish cake in this form — he knew fish cake as a flat, dense European thing. Korean fish cake (eomuk) is spongier, milder, and designed specifically to be simmered in broth so it absorbs flavor as it cooks. The skewer is practical genius — you hold the skewer with one hand, sip the cup of broth with the other, and eat slowly in the cold.

The anchovy stock is everything here. Soy sauce and radish go in, but the anchovy stock is what makes the broth taste like the sea in the best way — not fishy, just deeply marine and warming. For quick anchovy stock at home: 10 dried anchovies, a piece of dried kelp, 5 cups of water, simmer 15 minutes, strain. Andrei made it the following winter at home in Bucharest and reported that it worked but the cold sidewalk aspect was missing.