User:Donghoka/sandbox

Samgye-tang or ginseng chicken soup, meaning ginseng (kor. sam) - chicken (kor. gye) - soup (kor. tang) in Korean, consists primarily of a whole young chicken (poussin) - filled with garlic, rice, jujube, and ginseng. Samgye-tang is a Korean traditional soup for body health.

Origins and history
Samgyetang is a warm soup for hot summer days. It is especially popular to eat this chicken soup on sambok (삼복) days, which are three distinct days of the lunar calendar—Chobok (초복), Jungbok (중복), and Malbok (말복)—commonly among the hottest and most sultry summer days in Korea. Eating samgyetang on these days is believed to promote health.

Some specialty restaurants in South Korea serve nothing but samgyetang, having gained local popularity through their special recipes for the dish, which are often kept as secrets. The dish is sometimes accompanied by a small complimentary bottle of insam-ju (ginseng wine) in certain restaurants.

The way of making it is first stuffing the cavity of a whole spring chicken (which is about 3 to 6 months old and has not laid any eggs) with ginseng, Hedysarum root, jujubes, garlic, ginger and glutinous rice, then tying the legs of the chicken together to prevent the stuffing from falling out and then boiling it a stone pot or an earthenware bowl for about an hour.

Traditionally, samgyetang is considered as a “mother-in-law” cuisine because, in the old days, it was customary for the mother-in-law to kill one of her back-yard chickens to make samgyetang for her son-in-law who visited her. Therefore, to the Koreans, samgyetang is a cuisine filled with mother’s love.

Nowadays, there are modern versions of samgyetang. For example, there is samgyetang that uses ingredients such as deer antler chips, chestnuts, pine nuts, whole abalones with shells, and/or whole ginseng roots. Medicinal samgyetang which uses oriental herbal medicine and seafood samgyetang which contains baby octopus and blue crabs can also be found.

Etymology
The key ingredients of the dish by its name – “sam” literally means “ginseng”, “gye” means “chicken” and “tang” means “soup”. So, this dish is a soup made from ginseng and chicken as the key ingredients.