Haejang Guk (Hangover Soup)

My umma’s favorite soup is haejang guk (literally, “hangover soup”), which is funny because she never drinks. It still makes me laugh to think back to my petite little mom taking her kids to a hole-­in-­the-­wall haejang guk place for lunch, surrounded by ajeossis sweating out their hangovers around us, blowing their noses and wiping their brows and calling the ajumma over to ask for a bottle of soju, a little hair of the dog. My mom loves lots of ugeoji (here, dried napa cabbage leaves) in her haejang guk. (She also loves when it has lots of seonji, or coagulated blood, but that’s a recipe for another book.) It’s kind of a genius food-­waste hack to take the unsightly, larger, tougher leaves that surround the tender napa cabbage, dry them, and then reconstitute them for the umami-­rich base of a homey soup. If you can get your hands on some homemade beef bone broth that’s so thick, it’s Jell-O at room temperature, this is the perfect dish to use it for. You can also use bags of Korean-­style beef bone broth, which are great to have on hand (though not quite as thick and jiggly). If you find that your only option is using standard grocery store beef broth, or water, you can “beef it up” with a hunk of beef, beef bone, kelp, or dried mushrooms for additional umami, depth, and hangover-­fighting nutrients.

Published with permission from Soju Party by Irene Yoo Copyright © 2025 by Irene Yoo. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Weight-volume equivalents and recipe style may differ from recipes developed and published by Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street.