Maricela Hernandez de Silva, the wife of Eduardo Silva, Third Secretary and Consul at the Chilean Embassy in Seoul, has achieved an accomplishment -- after less than a year in Korea -- that few Koreans will achieve ever. She received last December an academic degree from Chile’s Instituto Diego Portales with a thesis on Korean food.

Hernandez de Silva is only a recent appreciator of Korean food, having only tasted the cuisine for the first time just two years ago. When she learned in late 2005 that her husband would be transferred to Seoul, she immediately paid a visit to a Korean restaurant in Santiago's Koreatown. Eating a culture's food, she believes, is the quickest way to understand that culture.

Maricela Hernandez de Silva serves her home-made version of jabchae, a traditional Korean dish of vegetables, meat and noodles.

Korean food proved to agree with Mrs. Hernandez de Silva quite well. She liked kimchi, namul (boiled and seasoned vegetables) and haemulpajeon (Korean-style pizza with seafood and spring onion topping). But she particularly adored dried anchovies. “I serve dried anchovies with soy sauce on the dinner table. They're too hot for us to eat them with hot pepper sauce like Koreans,” she said.

Soon after coming to Korea, she immersed herself in the culinary culture, studying Korean cookbooks and sampling the best food she could find. The streets of Seoul were like a giant buffet. She ate seafood, skewered meats and noodles from the city's many street stalls. “I love galbitang (beef-rib soup). It tastes like the traditional Chilean food cazuela,” she said.

Her passion for the local food led to her decision to write her thesis on Korean cuisine, as part of a course in international gastronomy. Korean food is still relatively uncommon in Chile, while Chinese and Japanese cuisines are well known there.

She said that the Korean style of serving was unusual for her, as the dishes are served together from the start. “It is also great to make food in consideration of nutrition and the effects of ingredients," Mrs. Hernandez de Silva said. "Chileans don’t care whether something is good for you or not as long as it tastes good.”

She was most impressed by the Korean style of sharing all the dishes on the table. “Chilean people eat food from their own personal dishes. In contrast, Koreans share dishes and eat soup from one pot," she said. "It feels good to share the food.” Her treatise deals with all these characteristics of Korean cuisine.

But while she loves Korean food, Mrs. Hernandez de Silva said that she was quite happy to find Chilean wine available here. So what kind of Chilean wine goes best with Korean food? “It's is a difficult question because Korean cuisine is so varied," she said. "But a cold Chardonnay white wine would be good for today’s dish of jabchae (noodles mixed with vegetables and meat).”

(englishnews@chosun.com )