Mullet soup is a famous specialty of Pyongyang.

   From old times, it is told that people couldn’t say their visit to Pyongyang if they had not taken mullet soup in Pyongyang.

   For a time, some restaurants in Pyongyang put spices of chili powder and garlic or added eggs when preparing the mullet soup. Nobody thought it was a wrong recipe.

   But President Kim Il Sung who had profound knowledge on the traditional dishes and recipes of our nation set it to the rights.

   In mid-March Juche 78 (1989), at a meeting to discuss the development of fishing industry, the President told the officials that if the spices of chili powder and garlic were put into the mullet soup, it would be no difference with the flat fish spicy soup which was liked by the local people from North Hamgyong Province. Saying that people who knew well about the mullet soup would laugh at it if it was sold with such spices added, he continued that you should first pour cold water in a caldron, put pieces of gray mullet after scraping its scales and washing clean and boil the soup with some pepper corns wrapped up in a thin cloth.

   And he added that the mullet soup should be boiled well until the fish was fully cooked, then there would be lots of oil on the soup as it was oily fish, and concluded that after the fish was well cooked, the soup should be salted properly, and soup and fish pieces put on the soup bowls, then it would be a delicious mullet soup.

   From then on, the mistakes in preparing the mullet soup in some restaurants were put to the rights and the recipe of mullet soup taught by the President was introduced to all restaurants as a standard.