Hwangpo-muk

The plain jelly is extracted from ground, soaked mung beans as a starch and cooked into a translucent block; steep it in water colored by the fruit of the gardenia and it turns yellow. It is counted among the eight celebrated tastes of Jeonju, traditionally made with the city's spring water, and the encyclopedias state outright that it cannot be left out of Jeonju bibimbap. Its most famous use is tangpyeongchae, the jelly tossed with beef, water dropwort, bean sprouts, gim and egg in a vinegar-soy dressing. By tradition the salad is named for King Yeongjo, who reigned in the eighteenth century, and his policy of even-handed balance among the court factions, the word tangpyeong meaning level and leaning to no side. That political association is widely repeated but rests on tradition rather than the earliest cookbooks, which record the dish, first in the late eighteenth century, with no political note and using pork; the popular reading of the salad's colors as the rival factions in harmony is a modern embellishment.

Cool and slippery on the tongue, with a soft, springy, faintly jiggly set that yields cleanly to the teeth. On its own it is almost without flavor, which is the point: it drinks up the dressing, so each piece arrives savory with soy, bright with vinegar and nutty with sesame oil and toasted gim. The color is its own pleasure, a pale translucent gold against the green of dropwort and the red of seasoned beef. It refreshes rather than fills, the lightest thing on a heavy Jeolla table.

The jelly is set by starch gelation: mung-bean starch swells and thickens sharply as it nears seventy degrees, and the cooked slurry sets on cooling into a translucent gel. Traditionally the beans are ground and the starch settled out over several hours before cooking; modern cooks use ready mung-bean starch at roughly one part to five or six of water. As the gel sets it slowly weeps water, which gives the soft-yet-springy mouthfeel, and because it is so near to flavorless it works as a blank carrier for seasoning. The yellow comes from gardenia, whose pigment is the carotenoid crocin, the same family that colors saffron, water-soluble and stable to heat and light. The starch is cooked, stirring constantly with a paddle as for making paste, poured into a moistened mold, and cooled to set before cutting.