Making these pan-fried fritters is a labor of love, timeless, joy-inducing and effusively Korean.
Gamja jeon, Korea’s answer to the potato pancake, is crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside.Credit…Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini.
I had never noticed jeon in my youth, not like I do now. Maybe because they were always there, at every party, holiday, Tuesday night dinner. While the mothers gathered in the kitchen to fry up brimming platters of the Korean fritters — with ingredients like meat (wanja jeon), kimchi (kimchi jeon) and cod (daegu jeon) — the fathers played cards in the dining room, drinking soju and beer, and we children ran amok upstairs playing video games. The smell in the air, fried oil, was singular.
