The Geographical Indications of the Korean Table

Roughly seventy per cent of the Korean peninsula is mountain or upland, and the cooking has grown out of that fact: short growing seasons in the north and east, narrow valleys, and a coastline that runs along three different seas. Rice was grown on the plains of the south and west, while the uplands gave barley, millet, buckwheat, potatoes and the wild greens of the mountains. The system of Geographical Indications, administered in South Korea by the state, now attaches a protected name to certain products whose character is held to belong to a particular place, and those names follow the same map of plain, upland, tidal flat and island.

The rice plains lie chiefly in Jeolla and Gyeonggi, where flat, well-watered land allowed the grain to become the centre of the meal. Icheon rice, from Gyeonggi, is among the registered names, and it stands for a table in which the bowl of rice is the fixed point and everything else, soup, jjigae and banchan, is arranged around it. Maangchi's Real Korean Cooking builds its recipes on exactly this structure, and a cook working from it will find that the seasoning of the side dishes is calibrated to plain steamed rice. The West Sea has wide tidal flats and a very large tidal range, which suits the making of salt. The salt pans of Sinan, in the south-west, are the best known of these, and sun-dried sea salt is the salt of kimchi making, where it draws water from napa cabbage (Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis) and Korean radish (Raphanus sativus) before the seasoning is applied. The same coast supplies the small shrimp and fish from which the salted seafood, jeotgal, is made, and the character of regional kimchi in the south and west is owed largely to these fermented seasonings. The East Sea is cold and deep, and its catch has long been walleye pollock (Gadus chalcogrammus) and squid. Pollock is eaten fresh, frozen, dried and in many other forms, and it is one of the fish most worked into everyday Korean cooking, in soups above all. The South Sea, broken into islands, gives anchovy, which, dried, is the base of the common stock for soups and noodles; Maangchi's recipes return to it again and again. Jeju, further out, has its own volcanic soil and its haenyeo, the women divers who gather abalone (Haliotis discus hannai) and other shellfish from the sea floor without breathing apparatus. The Gangwon highlands, cold and steep, are the country of potatoes and buckwheat, and of the dishes made from them: pancakes, noodles and starch preparations that suit a land where rice does not grow easily. Further south, Geumsan is the recognised centre of ginseng cultivation, and Geumsan ginseng is a registered name; Punggi in the north of Gyeongsang is likewise associated with the root. Sunchang gochujang and Boseong green tea are also registered names, the first tied to the fermented chilli paste of Jeolla and the second to the tea of the southern hills. Each of these names marks a link between a place and a product, and the Geographical Indication is best read as the legal expression of a geography that the cooking had already drawn.

The Korean table is built around plain steamed rice, and the seasoning of everything beside it is set against that neutral ground. Soups, jjigae and banchan are salted, fermented and chilli-hot to a degree that would be assertive alone but reads as balanced against the bowl. The salt of kimchi making, the jeotgal that gives depth to the seasoning, and the doenjang and gochujang of the southern and western tables supply the savoury, briny and fermented notes, while dried anchovy stock gives soups and noodles a clean marine base. Highland dishes of potato and buckwheat are milder and starchier, and the fish of the east coast, pollock above all, is eaten in soups that are clear and peppery. Across these regions the pattern holds: rice at the centre, and the surrounding dishes seasoned firmly enough to be eaten in small amounts with it.