Royal Court Cuisine as Intangible Heritage

The cooking of the Joseon court (1392–1910) was prepared in the royal kitchens of the Seoul palaces, the sura-gan, and drew its produce from every province, so that the table of the king gathered the regional larders of the whole peninsula. After the end of the dynasty in 1910, under Japanese rule, and again through the war of 1950–1953 and the division of the country, the knowledge of that kitchen survived through the women and men who had served in it and through the written texts that preceded them.

The written foundations of Korean cookery are domestic and scholarly rather than purely courtly, and the essay begins there. The Eumsik Dimibang, written by Lady Jang Gye-hyang in 1670, is among the earliest cookbooks in the Korean script, and records the cooking of a yangban household of the seventeenth century. The Sanga Yorok and the Gyuhap Chongseo of Lady Bingheogak Yi (1809) belong to the same tradition of household instruction, setting down methods for ferments, noodles, cakes, pickles and drinks in a form a cook could follow. The Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje, a farm and household compendium of the Joseon period, extends the record to the management of the kitchen, the larder and the seasons, and the Siui Jeonseo is read beside it for its prescriptions of the table. Taken together these texts show that what is now called court cuisine rested on a wider body of cooking, shared in method between palace and gentry house. The court table itself was ordered by rule. The king's meal, the surasang, was served with rice, soup, a pot dish, kimchi, sauces and a large number of banchan arranged on a single setting, and the kitchen worked by the seasons and by the offerings sent from the provinces. Seasoning was based on ganjang, doenjang and gochujang, with sesame oil, garlic, spring onion and the Korean chilli, Capsicum annuum, in its later centuries; the cooking aimed at balance of colour, texture and the five flavours rather than at heat. Maangchi's Big Book of Korean Cooking, the source on which this entry rests, shows how those same pantry foundations and the table of rice, soup and banchan continue in the Korean home, and so how the court's discipline of seasoning and arrangement passed into everyday practice. The continuity of the palace kitchen after 1910 was a matter of transmission from person to person. Cooks and ladies of the former court taught what they had learned, and the Republic of Korea later placed the cooking under its system of protection for intangible cultural properties, naming court cuisine as an important intangible cultural property with a designated holder responsible for its teaching. That line of holders passed from those trained in the last palace kitchens to their pupils, and the designation gave the cooking a formal custodian, a body of recorded recipes and a duty to train successors. The principle is that the dish is preserved as a practice, kept alive in the hands of those who cook it, and not only in the page. A second recognition concerns the household rather than the palace. In 2013 UNESCO inscribed kimjang, the making and sharing of kimchi, on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Kimjang is the late-autumn gathering in which napa cabbage, Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis, and Korean radish, Raphanus sativus, are salted, seasoned and packed to last the winter, and the inscription acknowledges it as a communal custom that binds families and neighbours. Placed beside the court designation, it shows the two poles of the Korean table that this book follows: the ordered cooking of the palace and the shared labour of the village and the city street. For the cook, the lesson of these authorities is practical. The old texts give the method and the proportions of a ferment or a broth, the protected line of holders keeps the court techniques demonstrated and taught, and the modern books render the same foundations for the kitchen of today. Each entry in this book that cites a court dish or a ferment rests on that chain, from the seventeenth-century manuscript to the cook now working at the stove.