Common ingredients include ham, sausage, spam, baked beans, kimchi, instant noodles, gochujang, and American cheese.

The dish is now a popular anju (accompaniment to alcoholic drinks) and a comfort food cooked in a large pot for multiple people.

piggy porridge), that was created around the time of the Korean War, when South Korea was experiencing significant poverty.

A prominent ingredient of the dish, Spam, was only made legally available for sale in 1987, around the time that South Korea democratized.

Although the dish came from conditions of poverty, it has remained consistently popular, even during and after South Korea's rapid economic growth.

The soup base can be plain water, although most prefer to make it with a fish, meat, or bone-based broth such as sagol-yuksu (사골육수; lit.

[10][11][5] Common ingredients include ham,[12][10] sausage,[10][13] lunch meats (e.g. Spam),[13][10] baked beans,[12][10] kimchi (fermented vegetables),[12][13][10] instant ramen noodles,[13] spicy flavoring packs that come with the ramen,[10] cellophane noodles,[14] gochujang (pepper paste),[13][10] Vienna sausages,[10] bacon,[12] tofu,[10] pork,[10] ground beef, mandu (dumplings), macaroni,[12] tteok (rice cakes),[13][10] American cheese,[13] mozzarella,[13] minari (water celery), scallions,[10] chili peppers,[10] garlic, corn,[10] zucchini,[10] mushrooms,[10] and other in-season vegetables.

Another restaurant in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi Province that was opened in 1973 has a budae-gogi ("military base meat") stir-fry that has been described as "budae-jjigae without soup".

A form of budae-jjigae developed in Yongsan District, Seoul is called Johnson-tang (존슨탕; Jonseuntang; lit.

[24][25] In Johnson-tang, kimchi is replaced with plain napa cabbage leaves, and ramen noodles are not added.

[30] The situation was made worse due to the collapse of the economy that had been run by imperial Japan, and the subsequent division of Korea between the Soviet Civil Administration in the North and the United States Army Military Government in the South.

[12][31][32] The difficulties did not stop, and only worsened; around 10% of the population died during the Korean War, which greatly disrupted the economy and society.

[32][14][12] Many foreign products were not legally available to South Koreans, and some were made artificially expensive due to tariffs even until 1987.

[27] During a crackdown on black market trading under the Park Chung Hee administration, smuggling food like Spam was a crime punishable by death.

Jeon alleges he deliberately set ramen's price as low as possible, in order to make it accessible to people who would otherwise eat kkulkkuri-juk.

[39] A number of people have recalled that, while the dish was highly sought after and enjoyed when consumed, its actual quality was poor in hindsight, especially because it was sometimes made with food scraps picked out of garbage from the military bases.

[12][27][36] In 2010, Lee Si-yeon recalled an incident from his boyhood, when he worked at Camp Henry:[a] One day, I mustered up the courage to speak to the military chaplain.

Heo worked at a fishcake stand in Uijeongbu, and occasionally encountered people who asked her to cook meats they had acquired from the nearby military base.

She began by simply stirfrying the meats, but eventually turned the dish into a stew containing kimchi, lard, and wild sesame oil.

[14] Another writer that published an article for the Cultural Heritage Administration in 2018 claimed that the dish did not reach national popularity until the 1970s.

[5][39] Over time, anchovy broth (flavored with gochujang and kimchi) began to be used as the base of the soup, a practice that has since persisted in some variations of budae-jjigae.

It captures the essence of great cooking over the last few centuries: improvisational, born of war and hardship, nostalgic, sentimental, and transformative.

[11][27][14] In 2020, Cătălina Stanciu wrote that "[t]he transformation of the Korean people's trauma story is embodied through the bowl of budaejjigae".

They'd say things like, "Americans have the best food and throw it away, and then Koreans buy that garbage," their voices filled with humiliation, resentment, and gratitude all at once.

[27]Some note that the dish evokes images of American imperialism, particularly related to controversies surrounding U.S. military bases in South Korea.

[27] The inclusion of Spam is a point of contention, as the food has been described as "the furthest thing from refined" and made the subject of jokes in popular culture.

The video showed the dish being made, while the audio was of a Korean War survivor talking about living off garbage from military bases.

She compared the invention of the dish to how filmmakers picked and chose various ideas "without asking within profoundly unequal relations of power, and [incorporated] that material into new cultural production".

[48] Jeong Dong-hyeon, writing for The Chosun Ilbo, likened the food to the music group BTS, which borrows elements of Western culture but is widely accepted as Korean.

[5] The chef Park Chan-il contended that Korean cuisine had previously accepted new adaptations, and that what mattered was the enjoyment of the dish.