My son doesn’t have a word for “surplus military rations,” but he lights up whenever a hot dog slice floats up in our budae-jjigae.
It’s not just soup: budae-jjigae’s Spam, hot dogs, and kimchi trace straight back to U.S. Army surplus after the Korean War. Budae-jjigae (부대찌개, budae-jjigae, literally “army-unit stew”) gets those ingredients from one specific piece of history: after the Korean War (1950–1953) left the country with almost nothing to cook with, Koreans working near U.S. Army bases started stretching surplus and discarded canned meat into a stew, mixed with the kimchi and chili paste they already had at home.
What Exactly Is Budae-jjigae?
Strip away the history for a second and it’s a communal hot pot — built in a wide, shallow pan, usually cooked right at the table on a portable burner, shared by however many people are sitting around it. The base is a red, gochujang-spiked broth, and the fillings are the part that makes first-time visitors do a double take:
- Spam or a similar canned luncheon meat, sliced
- Sliced hot dogs or sausages
- Baked beans
- Kimchi (김치, gimchi, Korea’s fermented spicy cabbage)
- Gochujang (고추장, gochujang, Korea’s fermented red chili paste), sometimes with extra chili flakes for heat
- Often, instant ramen noodles, sliced rice cake, tofu, or a slice of American cheese melted in at the end
None of that reads like a “traditional” Korean ingredient list, because it isn’t one. It’s an American pantry dropped into a Korean pot. That’s not an accident of the recipe — that’s the entire point of it.
Why Does the Name Literally Mean “Army Base Stew”?
Budae (부대, budae) is just the ordinary Korean word for a military unit or base — not a special culinary term, not a euphemism. Add jjigae (찌개, jjigae, “stew”), and the dish’s name translates directly, with no metaphor attached, to “army base stew.” Koreans aren’t being cute or ironic when they call it that. They’re describing where the ingredients actually came from, plainly, in the name itself.
(I’d always half-assumed the name was a nickname that stuck later, once people noticed the ingredients.
It’s not.
It’s the original, literal name, and it was never meant to be subtle.)
That bluntness is part of what makes the dish feel different from most beloved Korean food. A lot of iconic dishes get a softened, mythologized name tied to a region or a royal court somewhere along the way. This one just tells you, flatly, where it came from — a period nobody’s especially interested in romanticizing.
How Uijeongbu Became the Birthplace of Budae-jjigae
Uijeongbu, a city just north of Seoul that was home to a major U.S. Army garrison for decades before the base fully relocated to Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek by 2018, is the place most consistently credited as budae-jjigae’s birthplace. In the 1960s, a woman named Heo Gi-suk started a street food cart near Uijeongbu Station, cooking with sausage, ham, and bacon she sourced from the base nearby.
In 1968, she formally registered the business as a restaurant: Odeng Sikdang (오뎅식당, Odeng Sikdang, literally “fish-cake restaurant”). The name has nothing to do with the dish that actually made her famous — a small mismatch I still find a little funny every time I think about it. Odeng Sikdang is still open today, on a stretch of Uijeongbu now signposted as “Budae-jjigae Street,” lined with restaurants doing their own versions of the dish Heo Gi-suk started serving more than half a century ago.
What gets me about that timeline is how ordinary the invention actually sounds once you lay it out. Nobody set out to start a fusion food trend. A woman needed to feed people, she used what she could get near a base, and an entire street eventually grew up around the fact that it worked.
The Uglier, Truer Ancestor: Kkulkkuli-juk
Budae-jjigae has a rougher predecessor that rarely makes it into the tidier version of this story: kkulkkuli-juk (꿀꿀이죽, kkulkkuli-juk, literally “pig-slop porridge”). It’s exactly as unglamorous as the name suggests — a porridge boiled from literal leftover food scraps collected from U.S. Army mess halls, at a point when even “surplus canned meat” would have counted as an upgrade.
The two dishes get separated mostly by one detail: instant ramen noodles. Kkulkkuli-juk never had them, because it belongs to an earlier, harder stretch of time before that ingredient existed in anyone’s kitchen. Budae-jjigae, as it standardized into something closer to the dish sold today, commonly does. By the 1970s, kkulkkuli-juk had essentially disappeared, edged out as budae-jjigae became the more palatable, more repeatable version of the same basic idea.
Same wartime logic. Better execution.
| Kkulkkuli-juk (꿀꿀이죽) | Budae-jjigae (부대찌개) | |
|---|---|---|
| What went in the pot | Literal leftover scraps from U.S. Army mess halls | Chosen ingredients: Spam, hot dogs, baked beans, kimchi, gochujang |
| Instant ramen noodles | No — predates the ingredient entirely | Often, once ramen became available |
| Still eaten today? | No — disappeared by the 1970s | Yes — a mainstream comfort food |
That table is basically a timeline of a country climbing, one degree at a time, out of the worst years of the postwar period. Nobody eats kkulkkuli-juk anymore because nobody has to.
Budae-jjigae FAQ
What is budae-jjigae?
Budae-jjigae is a Korean hot-pot stew built on a red gochujang broth, filled with Spam or similar canned meat, sliced hot dogs, baked beans, kimchi, and often instant ramen noodles, cheese, or rice cake. It’s typically cooked communally at the table on a portable burner.
Why is it called “army base stew”?
Budae (부대) is the ordinary Korean word for a military unit or base; jjigae (찌개) means stew. The name translates literally, with no metaphor, because the dish’s American canned-meat ingredients originally came from surplus and discarded food connected to U.S. Army bases after the Korean War.
Where did budae-jjigae originate?
Uijeongbu, a city near Seoul that was long home to a U.S. Army garrison (the base has since relocated to Pyeongtaek), is most consistently credited as the birthplace. Restaurant owner Heo Gi-suk started a street cart there in the 1960s using base-sourced sausage, ham, and bacon, and formally registered her restaurant, Odeng Sikdang, in 1968 — it’s still open today on what’s now called “Budae-jjigae Street.”
What’s the difference between budae-jjigae and kkulkkuli-juk?
Kkulkkuli-juk (꿀꿀이죽, “pig-slop porridge”) was an earlier, cruder dish made by boiling actual leftover scraps collected from U.S. Army mess halls, without instant ramen noodles. Budae-jjigae used chosen ingredients instead of scraps, commonly added ramen, and became the standardized, more palatable version — kkulkkuli-juk had disappeared by the 1970s.
I’ve written before about chimaek — Korean fried chicken and beer — as a dish shaped by a different slice of the same postwar, military-adjacent history. Budae-jjigae is the blunter cousin: no bar culture standing in between it and the source, just an actual U.S. Army supply chain landing straight in a Korean pot. My wife, who’d pick a cold bowl of naengmyeon over hot soup any day of the year, still eats budae-jjigae without complaint — it might be the one hot dish that clears our household’s cold-food veto. My son will get the full history someday. For now, he just gets the hot dog pieces, and honestly, that’s not a bad place to start.