The Regions of Korean Cooking

Korean cooking grew on a mountainous peninsula with sea on three sides, where rice and barley fields in the south and west gave way to the millet, buckwheat and potato country of the north and the high east. Four distinct seasons, a long tradition of fermenting soybeans and vegetables against winter, and a court at Seoul that wrote its dishes down together produced a cuisine with strong regional voices and one shared grammar.

The regions are best understood as variations on a common structure: rice, soup, a set of banchan, and the fermented foundations of jang and kimchi. The royal court kitchen of the Joseon dynasty stood at the head of this structure. Its dishes drew on produce sent from every province, and its standards of balance, cutting and seasoning passed outward to the households of the capital. Seoul and Gyeonggi province, around it, kept a cooking of moderate salt and restrained seasoning, with clear soups, beef and the refined tables of the yangban households. Jeolla, in the south-west, is held across Korea to have the most abundant and elaborate table: generous banchan, well-aged jeotgal, strongly seasoned kimchi and a farming and fishing hinterland that supplied both. Gyeongsang, in the south-east, is generally salter and hotter, with a cooking of the sea, dried and raw fish, and robust, direct flavours. Gangwon, in the mountainous east, cooks with buckwheat, potato, corn and the fish of the East Sea, including walleye pollock (Gadus chalcogrammus), while Jeju, the volcanic island, relies on the produce of its shore and its own soil, with seafood prepared simply and seasoned lightly. The North, with its colder climate, is associated with noodles, dumplings, grains and milder, less heavily salted kimchi, and its cooking travelled south with those displaced by the division. The written record gives the cuisine unusual depth. The Eumsik Dimibang, written by Lady Jang Gye-hyang in 1670, is among the earliest Korean cookbooks composed in Hangul, and records the dishes and methods of a gentry household. The Gyuhap Chongseo of Lady Bingheogak Yi, of 1809, is a household encyclopaedia that sets out the cooking of the period, including the making of jang and kimchi. The Siui Jeonseo, a nineteenth-century work, is likewise a source for the dishes and methods of its time. Together these texts show a cuisine already articulated in method and principle well before the modern era. The jang, meaning doenjang, ganjang and gochujang, and kimchi are the grammar of the cuisine. Fermented soybean and salted vegetable supply salt, depth and keeping quality, and nearly every soup, stew, seasoned vegetable and braise is built on one or the other. Chilli, the Korean Capsicum annuum, came to the peninsula only in the later Joseon period, and its arrival reshaped kimchi and gochujang into the forms now familiar. The banchan principle follows from this: a meal is rice and soup at the centre, with several small dishes of differing technique, taste and colour set around them, shared by the table rather than served in courses. The temple tradition added a further discipline, cooking without meat, fish or the strong alliums, and relying on vegetables, mountain greens, soybeans and fermented seasonings to build flavour. The twentieth century altered the table sharply. Under Japanese rule, from 1910 to 1945, the colonial economy turned Korean agriculture toward extraction, and rice was exported while many Koreans ate less of it; the period also brought Japanese ingredients and influences into the kitchen, and the court's institutions were dismantled. The war of 1950 to 1953 and the division that followed devastated the peninsula, displaced millions and separated the cooking of North and South, while scarcity shaped the dishes of the post-war years. Economic growth in the South then rebuilt the food system, and the Seoul Olympics of 1988 placed Korea before an international audience. Together with the long-established Korean communities abroad, notably in the United States, where writers such as Maangchi, David Chang, Roy Choi and Edward Lee have set out the cooking in their books, this began the export of the cuisine that continues today.

The taste of Korean regional cooking runs on salt, fermentation, chilli, sesame and the sweetness of grain and vegetable, balanced across the small dishes of the table rather than within a single plate. The south and the coasts lean salter, hotter and more strongly fermented, while Seoul and the north keep to a milder seasoning, and the temple table draws its depth from jang, mountain greens and vegetable stocks.