Voice of Korea

/ Health & Fitness

Samgye Soup and Its Legend

The summer heat has a negative effect on the human body. People take Samgye soup, a health food, when they lose their appetite and become weak due to sultriness.

Here is a recipe for Samgye soup. First you should clean fowl and put glutinous rice, insam, chestnuts and dried jujube inside its stomach. Then put it whole into a cauldron, pour water in it and boil it on intense fire for a while. And then stew it until the medicinal ingredients of insam and chicken fully come off and the soup is boiled down appropriately.
When eating, you can put salt in the soup according to your taste.
Samgye soup is a traditional food of the Korean nation. It has a legend about the Korean people's utmost filial piety to their parents.
Once upon a time, there was a dutiful son who devoted himself to his parent. He showed all his sincerity to save his ailing parent, but only in vain.
One day, he heard a doctor say that it is necessary to boil a soup with chicken and wild insam in order to save his parent. So he made up his mind to prepare it at any cost.
He went up and down the mountains in search of a wild insam and eventually found out a rare wild insam and made Samgye soup with it.
His parent is said to have recovered his health overnight after eating the soup prepared by his son.
Since then, the Samgye soup was also called Hyosong soup as it was associated with the utmost filial piety of the son.
Since they began to cultivate insam, people have used it in making Samgye soup.
Samgye soup is made of chicken with high nutritive value and insam well-known as the elixir of life and cure-all. The Korean people widely take it as a health food.