I Heart Food Idioms: Okoge!

What's got two thumbs,
hangs out with mostly gays,
and makes Japanese people think of crusty rice?

That's right!

<--- C'est MOI!

John Youngsun Park, a designer of video games in the San Francisco Bay Area, blasts the heat on his Sanyo [rice cooker] to make noo roong ji, the toasted crust of rice that forms at the bottom of the traditional Korean stone rice pot...

“People love that toasted-rice taste,” he said. “It’s even a flavor of ice cream in Seoul.” (Japanese cooks, however, consider toasted rice overcooked and highly undesirable. The unwanted crust left stuck to the bottom of the rice cooker is called okoge — the same word used as slang for a single woman who spends a lot of time with gay men.)
-JULIA MOSKIN, NYT

Yep. One country's Häagen-Dazs® is another country's fruit fly.

Salty Side-Note: Way to go, NYT, for finding a momo bourgeois Hong Kong transplant to speak for 1.3 billion Chinese:

SHIRLEY CHAN, a Chinese-American Web site designer, was born in Hong Kong, lives in Brooklyn, and has never cooked a pot of rice in her life. “One billion Chinese people cannot be wrong about rice,” she said: virtually every household has at least a basic rice cooker. As a child, it was her chore before each meal to wash the rice, measure it into the machine, and press the button. “It always, always comes out perfect,” she said. “Until I came here, I never even knew rice could burn.”
-JULIA MOSKIN, NYT

Mmmhmm.

For the record--Shirley, is it?--you're half-right.  My mom owned a rice cooker for 20+ years.  It sat on the top shelf in our highest cabinet.  And do you want to know why?

Because it's not. Hard. To cook rice. On the stove.

Anyone who can measure water with a fingertip can do it. 

That's what Momma Foodie does in Hong Kong, and that's what I do here in NYC.

And though their use is perfectly valid and popular, I seriously doubt that the vast peasant population of China depends on digital rice cookers/warmers/insulators/babysitters for dinner.

Comments

[emi]

I read this article too, and had one thing to say: We Japanese love burnt rice, too! I don't know which Japanese cooks they spoke to, but I personally don't know a single one that finds them "highly undesirable." YUM!
On a side note, "okama" means both "(rice) pot" and "gay male" in Japanese... hence the "okoge" that sticks to the "okama." :)