Siui Jeonseo and the Joseon Food Tradition

The Siui Jeonseo (시의전서) is a late Joseon manuscript of household and banquet cookery, kept within the tradition of the yangban households and the capital, and it belongs to the line of Korean cookery texts that begins with the Sanga Yorok and runs through the Eumsik Dimibang of Lady Jang Gye-hyang (1670), the Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje and the Gyuhap Chongseo of Lady Bingheogak Yi (1809). Together these texts record how the Joseon kingdom, which lasted from 1392 to 1910, ate at court, in the scholar-official home and at the ceremonial table.

The Joseon food tradition is known chiefly through its written texts, and the Siui Jeonseo (시의전서) is valued among them as a record of the dishes and the manner of serving at a late Joseon banquet. It sets out the cooking of rice, noodles, soups, steamed and braised dishes, pancakes, kimchi and sweets, together with the way they were arranged for ceremony and for guests. Like the other manuscripts of its line, it addresses a cook who already knows the work of the kitchen. The older texts show how the tradition formed. The Eumsik Dimibang, written in Korean script by Lady Jang Gye-hyang in 1670, was composed by a woman of a scholarly household for the women who ran such kitchens. The Gyuhap Chongseo of Lady Bingheogak Yi (1809) is a household encyclopedia that gathers the methods of brewing, pickling, preserving and cooking. The Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje is an enlarged work on farm and household management in which food and its keeping have a place beside agriculture. Each of these rests on the same foundation: fermented soy, salt, grain, seasonal vegetables and the careful preservation that carried a household through the cold months. The court table is a related but separate matter. Court cuisine, the food of the royal kitchens of Joseon, was designated a protected intangible cultural heritage of Korea, and its knowledge has passed down a line of recognised holders, each of whom received the practice from the one before. The formal dishes of the palace, with their ordered arrangement of many small plates, have therefore remained in living use and have not survived only on the page. The household side of the same tradition was recognised internationally in 2013, when UNESCO inscribed kimjang, the making and sharing of kimchi, on its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Kimjang is the communal late-autumn work of salting napa cabbage (Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis) and Korean radish (Raphanus sativus), seasoning them with gochugaru, garlic and salted seafood, and laying them down for the winter. It is the clearest surviving link between the pages of these old books and the kitchens of today. For the modern cook the texts matter because the dishes of the present table descend from them. The everyday Korean meal, with its soups, its banchan, its kimchi and its fermented pastes, follows the plan the old households set down: rice and soup at the centre, with the seasoned and preserved dishes arranged around them.

The tradition these texts record rests on fermented soy, in the form of doenjang, ganjang and gochujang, on sesame, garlic and spring onion, and on the sour, salted depth of well-made kimchi. At the court and banquet table these flavours were laid out in measured balance across many small dishes, whereas the household table set rice and soup at the centre with banchan around them, a plan that still shapes the Korean meal.