Yetnal Tongdak

Korea's modern chicken story runs from the electric rotisserie whole birds that appeared in Seoul around 1960, through a turn to deep-frying after locally made soybean cooking oil arrived in quantity in 1971, which made frying a whole bird in oil affordable and popular. The first fried-chicken chain opened in 1977 serving Western-style cut-and-fried pieces, and the sauced yangnyeom style and the franchise boom followed in the 1980s. Yetnal-tongdak is the name later given, in nostalgic retrospect, to that pre-franchise market-stall bird — plainly fried, sold whole, no sauce. It is folk food rather than an invented dish, and it had a notable comeback from around 2010 as an inexpensive, retro alternative to franchise chicken.

All shatter and clean chicken flavor. The thin coating fries to a brittle, lacy crust with no thick batter to get in the way, so each piece snaps and then gives juicy, well-seasoned meat. Salt and pepper do all the seasoning — no sweet, no sticky sauce — and a dip in the salt-and-pepper cup sharpens it further. Eaten hot from the fryer it is greasy in the good way, crisp-skinned and homely, the rice cakes from the same oil chewy-crisp alongside.

The point is a thin coating and a clean fry, not the thick, shatter-for-hours shell of modern Korean fried chicken. Cutting the bird into parts lets it cook through evenly in the oil; a light dusting of flour or a thin batter dries the skin's surface so it crisps fast and seals juices without building a heavy crust. Plain salt-and-pepper seasoning, rather than a sugar-bearing sauce, keeps the crust dry and crackly. Some cooks fry once at a moderate heat to cook the meat and again hotter to crisp, the same double-fry logic that drives off surface moisture for a drier, sturdier crunch. Frying rice cakes and gizzards in the same oil is part of the tradition.