New here? This is the seventh article in our Banchan Deep Dive series: one Korean side dish per article. If Korean restaurants are new to you, start with Part 1 and Part 2 of the Survival Guide, then the rules for eating banchan. Last time we covered oi-muchim, the cucumber that gets salted before anyone seasons it. Today's dish is the one you have almost certainly eaten without being able to say what it was made of.
Recipes vary by restaurant and household. When it matters, ask.
Look up fish cake in an English dictionary. Any of them.
Merriam-Webster gives you a round fried cake made of shredded fish and mashed potato. Collins gives you fish and potato, shaped flat and round, covered in breadcrumbs, fried. Cambridge says potato. Oxford says potato. The oldest recipe printed in English under that name, in a Victorian household manual, calls for the remains of any cold fish, equal quantities of bread crumbs and cold potatoes, and the white of an egg to bind it before frying.
Five dictionaries and a cookbook from 1861, all describing the same patty. Potato in every one.
Now walk into a Korean grocery store and find the refrigerated case with the English sign that reads, in plain letters, Fish Cake. Pick up any bag and turn it over.
There is no potato in that bag. There has never been potato in that bag. There is fish, and starch, and a little sugar, and a manufacturing step the English word does not describe and was never asked to.
The sign is not lying to you. It is using a word that already belongs to something else.
The thing in the bag is eomuk (어묵), one of the most ordinary side dishes in Korea, quietly mislabeled in English for the entire time you have been reading Korean menus. This article is about what is in it, why the name went wrong, and what to do with a bag once you have carried one home.
What is Korean fish cake?
Korean fish cake, or eomuk, is white fish ground to a paste, washed to concentrate its protein, mixed with starch, salt and sugar, formed into sheets, bars or tubes, and cooked until it sets firm and springy. It is sold refrigerated or frozen, and it is eaten three ways: stir fried as a side dish, simmered in a clear broth, and sliced into a pan of tteokbokki.
Is Korean fish cake the same as Japanese fish cake?
They are relatives, not twins. The Japanese family splits by method: kamaboko is steamed on a small wooden board, chikuwa is grilled around a skewer, satsuma-age is fried. Korean commercial fish cake is nearly always fried during manufacture and sold in flat sheets and bars, and it is seasoned and used differently once it reaches a kitchen. Same springy protein, different shapes, different jobs.
Is Korean fish cake gluten free?
No, and it is easy to get wrong. A commercial Korean fish cake is more than half fish paste and around 30 percent wheat flour, so the wheat is structural. You cannot ask for it to be left out, because the restaurant did not put it in: it bought the fish cake already made. Gluten-free versions exist and are rare, so the question at a table is whether this one is, and the honest fallback is to skip it. On a bag, the label settles it.
What is the difference between eomuk and odeng?
Odeng is a Korean borrowing of the Japanese word oden, which names a pot rather than an ingredient: a simmered winter dish that fish cake goes into. Korea gave the pot's name to the thing floating in it, and for most of the twentieth century that was simply what fish cake was called. The national language institute recommended eomuk in the early nineteen nineties. Broadcasting and packaging followed. Shop signs and everyday speech did not, so you will hear both.
Can you order Korean fish cake at a restaurant?
It depends which one. The stir fried side dish arrives as banchan, unordered and free, so you cannot choose it, though asking for more is ordinary. The fish cake in tteokbokki comes with the tteokbokki. The one you can actually order is the soup, listed as eomuk-tang, eomuk-guk, odeng-tang or odeng-guk, and it turns up where people are drinking and in convenience stores.
What is Korean Fish Cake?
Eomuk is white fish, ground to a paste, mixed with starch and salt and a little sugar, shaped, and cooked until it sets. A typical one is more than half fish paste and about a third wheat flour, with carrot and onion making up the rest. It arrives already made. A sheet out of the bag drapes over your fingers like a damp tortilla.
That is the ingredient list. The verb is where it gets interesting.
A patty is bound. Something holds it together from the outside: potato, breadcrumb, egg, flour. Take the binder away and a patty is a pile.
Eomuk is not bound. It is set.
The fish is washed first, repeatedly, in cold water, which sounds like cleaning and is not. Washing carries off the blood and the water-soluble parts and leaves behind a rising concentration of the muscle proteins, which is the point. The concentrated paste is then ground with salt, and the salt pulls one of those proteins, myosin, out of the muscle fiber and into solution. Then heat goes in. The myosin locks into a mesh, the mesh traps the water, and the fish sets itself.
You can feel the difference before you can explain it. Bite a slice and it resists, then gives, then returns to the shape it started in, and your mouth files the result under a texture English has no good word for. Nothing held together by potato does that.
The international standards that govern this category call the washed, concentrated paste surimi, and you have already met it. It is printed on the imitation crab in the chilled case at your regular supermarket, the sticks with the orange stripe down one side. Same protein, same trick, different marketing department.
What eomuk is for, in Korea, is the small dish. Eomuk-bokkeum (어묵볶음), fish cake cut into strips and stir fried with garlic and onion in a soy sauce that leans sweet, is one of the most common banchan in the country. It is in restaurants, in packed lunches and in nearly every household refrigerator, and it is eaten cold as readily as warm.
This blog has already handed you one banchan you had in your pantry before you knew its name: gim. This one was already in your dinner. If you have eaten tteokbokki, the pale flat ovals beside the rice cakes were this. You noticed the texture, decided it was some kind of noodle, and never found out. The same sheet, sliced, also goes inside gimbap (김밥), the rice roll, which will get its own article.
💡 The one that looks gluten-free and is not
Fish, starch, vegetables. Nothing in that description sounds like bread, and wheat is in essentially every commercial fish cake. Ask about the fish cake by name rather than asking whether a dish is gluten-free: a server hearing that is thinking about what the kitchen adds, and the fish cake arrived already made.
The City That Made It
Two histories are stacked here, and picking only one is how you end up confidently wrong.
The older one is written down. An interpreter in the seventeen-hundreds recorded a dish of pounded fish flesh mixed with pork, beef and mushrooms, and a Korean cookbook from the late nineteen-thirties has it again under another name. So anyone who tells you flatly that fish cake is a Japanese import has skipped a page.
The other history produced the bag in your hand. It is industrial, and it starts in Busan.
Japanese-run fish cake factories opened in the port city from 1907 and clustered there for two decades, around what had been Korea's first modern public market. The first Korean-owned factory came after Japanese rule ended, in another Busan market. Then the Korean War arrived and the entire country arrived with it. Refugees compressed into the southern port, ate what the port made, and carried it home when they went home. A regional food went national because an emergency put everybody in the same place for three years.
Which is why an American Korean grocery stocks a bag that says Busan Fish Cake, and why that is a quality claim rather than a postcard. Busan makers held to a higher fish content than the standard, up to 70 percent against the 50 to 60 percent common elsewhere, and you can feel it: more fish means a firmer set and a slice that holds its shape in a simmering pot.
The oldest surviving maker was founded in nineteen fifty-three, in a shack, by a man whose grandson runs it now. Just over a decade ago it opened a shop laid out like a bakery, trays and tongs and a counter, everything on display fish cake shaped into croquettes and pastries. Last December it listed on the Korean stock exchange at roughly three times its offer price, on a food most Americans have eaten without learning the name of.
The Word That Was Already Taken
Seven years ago the Korean government decided the English name was a problem and ran a public competition to replace it. The stated goal was a name that would help buyers abroad understand what they were buying, and sell more of it.
Eight thousand eight hundred and eighty-four people entered.
The runner-up was sea quenelle, closer than fish cake and still not right. A quenelle, in the dictionaries that define it, is chopped fish worked into a paste of flour or breadcrumb and poached. The flour does the binding. That is the potato problem again in French.
The grand prize went to eomuk. The romanization. The word Korea already had.
Which reads like a punchline and is the most defensible answer available, because the word that fits best was ruled out on other grounds. The standards bodies that define this category use surimi, thirty-nine times in the governing code of practice, against zero uses of fish cake. The American regulator permits surimi on a consumer package, in those letters, on a shelf in Ohio. It is unambiguous, correct, and already in three English dictionaries.
It is also Japanese. One of the stated criteria for the contest was differentiation from other countries' products, and you cannot differentiate yourself with your neighbor's loanword. Whatever else the judges got wrong, they did not get that wrong.
Here is the part most complaints about food translation get backward.
Cake was never a dessert word. Its first sense in English, from the thirteenth century, is a flat mass of baked dough, unleavened as often as not. Merriam-Webster still lists a flattened round mass of food that is baked or fried, and the example it prints under that sense is, word for word, a fish cake. It also keeps the sense that has nothing to do with food: a block of compacted or congealed matter. A cake of ice. A cake of soap. Something pressed together until it holds.
Which is, if you go back four paragraphs, a fairly good description of what happens to myosin.
So the word is not the mistake. The mistake is that the compound already has an owner. Fish cake has meant a fish-and-potato croquette in English since the middle of the nineteenth century, which is to say it was in print before the first fish cake factory opened in Busan. Korea did not take a word nobody was using. Korea took a word with a tenant in it.
💡 The same thing happened to rice cake
Look up rice cake in Collins and you get a wafer or cracker made from puffed rice. Cambridge gives you a biscuit made of puffed rice. Neither mentions tteok, or mochi, or anything chewy at all. The compound was taken the same way fish cake was, and by something even less like the original. Two of the most-eaten foods in Korea are filed in English under names that point somewhere else.
None of this is a Korean peculiarity. The Japanese government writes Mochi (Rice Cake) on its own tourism pages. Chinese has a character, gao, meaning a steamed or baked mass of ground grain, and it maps onto cake so cleanly that a Beijing signage standard uses Cake for street foods that do not contain the character at all. Three countries, one habit.
Korea differs in one way. Tteok and muk are native Korean words with no Chinese character behind them, so there was never a gao waiting to be translated into cake. The cake came from the English side, unaccompanied.
And the Korean word points the other direction entirely. The muk in eomuk is the same muk as in dotorimuk (도토리묵), acorn jelly, and in the buckwheat and mung bean versions beside it: a starch slurry cooked and left to set firm. Korea filed its fish cake with the things that congeal. The government's own translation table renders every one of those dishes into English as Jelly. Every single one.
Except the fish one. That one it renders as Fishcake.
Eomuk or Odeng?
You will hear both words in Korea, and they are not equivalent. The reason is a category error that happened on the way across the strait.
In Japanese, kamaboko is the product and oden is the pot: a simmered winter dish where various items including fish cake sit in broth for a long time. The fish cake is one of the things in the oden. It is not the oden.
Korean picked up the name of the pot and applied it to the thing in the pot, and it stuck so hard that for most of the twentieth century the ordinary Korean word for fish cake was odeng. In the early nineteen-nineties the national language institute recommended eomuk instead, and the standard dictionary now lists odeng as non-standard.
The recommendation half worked, which is what usually happens. Broadcasting says eomuk. Packaging says eomuk. Textbooks say eomuk. Shop signs and the sentences people say out loud have not moved nearly as far, and cooks who write about Korean food in English keep admitting it in print: they write eomuk-guk and then say odeng-guk, because that is the name they grew up with.
The soup has four names and one recipe. Eomuk-tang, eomuk-guk, odeng-tang and odeng-guk are the same dish. Dried anchovies and a sheet of kelp go into water with a piece of radish, simmer, and come back out, and the clear broth left behind is what the fish cake stands in. Soy sauce for soup, salt, and that is the whole of it. No chili, no color, no theater. It deserves an article of its own, which it will get.
Now the other question, the one you would type into a search box. Korean and Japanese fish cake are relatives, and the family splits by method rather than nationality. Steamed on a small board is kamaboko. Grilled around a skewer into a tube is chikuwa. Fried is the third branch. Korean commercial fish cake leaves the factory already fried, which puts it nearest that third branch, and this blog will call that a resemblance rather than a pedigree, because a resemblance is what the evidence supports.
How to Eat It
Two of the three ways you meet this are not orderable.
The one on the little plate is not on the menu. Eomuk-bokkeum arrives as banchan, unordered and free, alongside whatever you did order. You do not choose it, and the tray is the kitchen's decision rather than yours. What you can do is ask for more of it, which is ordinary and costs nothing.
The one in the tteokbokki came with the tteokbokki. Those pale ovals are not a topping you add or subtract. They are part of the dish, which matters if you are avoiding fish, because a pan of rice cakes has fish in it.
The one you can actually order is the soup. Look for eomuk-tang, or the same thing spelled odeng-tang, and expect it where people are drinking, or in the heated case at a Korean convenience store in winter.
Treat it, whichever way it reaches you, as the quiet one. Eomuk has no heat in it and the standard side dish has none either. On a table where something is red and something else is fermented and a third thing is doing an aggressive thing with garlic, this is the plate that asks nothing of you. Push it toward whoever is nervous.
If you cook it yourself, two things. Thin flat sheets are for the side dish, thicker bars and mixed packs for the pot. And give it thirty seconds in boiling water first: it was fried at the factory and carries that oil to your kitchen. Every source calls that step optional and every source mentions it.
💡 The number worth knowing
A Korean consumer agency tested twelve fish cakes last year: 689 to 983 mg of sodium per 100 g, a third to half a day's allowance depending on the product. Nothing else in the test was alarming. And the salt is not an additive anybody could dial back, because salt is what pulls the protein out and sets it firm. It is doing structural work. That does not make it less salt.
Why This Dish Matters
Last year KPop Demon Hunters became one of the most-watched things on Netflix, and its food got noticed, and what got noticed most was an absence.
There is no kimchi in it, and that was deliberate. The director has said she wanted foods on screen that people were not already familiar with, and kimchi was the one thing everybody already had a picture of, so it was kept off the table on purpose.
Something had to fill the seat. What filled it, along with the cold noodles and the ox bone soup and the convenience store snacks, was a pot of fish cake soup, skewers standing up in clear broth, watched by an audience in the hundreds of millions.
This blog runs a whole series on the premise that kimchi is the least interesting way into Korean food, so it is hard to be neutral about a global hit making the same argument. The banchan tray is where a Korean meal lives. Kimchi is one dish on it. Fish cake is another, and it has been sitting there the entire time, under an English name that describes a completely different food and tells you nothing.
The contest to fix the name is over. Seven judges from the seafood and trade industries produced the word Korea started with.
More than a hundred and fifty people had submitted that same word. The prize went to whoever filed it first, at 9:07 in the morning on the day the entries opened.
Next on this blog: Chuseok. Eomuk is white fish that gave up its shape and got a new one. On a Chuseok table the same fish is sliced, kept exactly as it is, dipped in egg and fried, and nobody can start early because jeon goes soft if it sits. A pan that waits, small meat patties and split green chillies waiting with it, and a first-timer handed a job he did not ask for. Everyone calls it Korean Thanksgiving. That is about half right.
If this series is your kind of thing, subscribe. One Korean side dish at a time, until the little plates stop being a mystery.
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