Temple Food and the Written Tradition

Temple food, sachal eumsik (사찰음식), belongs to the Buddhist monasteries of the Korean peninsula, where cooking was shaped by the monastic discipline of abstaining from meat and, in the Korean tradition, from the pungent alliums and their kin. Buddhism came to the peninsula in the fourth century and was the state religion under Goryeo; under the Neo-Confucian Joseon dynasty (1392–1897) it lost court favour, and the mountain temples remained the places where its table was kept. The written record of Korean cooking sits beside this living practice, in household and court texts that begin in the seventeenth century.

The written tradition on which this book rests is largely a record of the households of the Joseon elite. The Eumsik Dimibang (음식디미방), composed by Lady Jang Gye-hyang in 1670, is generally taken as the earliest surviving cookery text in Hangul written by a woman, and it sets down the methods of a provincial yangban kitchen: the brewing of wine, the preparation of noodles, meats and fish, and the keeping of preserved foods. The Sanga Yorok (산가요록), a manual of mountain-household practice from the fifteenth century, belongs to the earlier strand of agricultural and preservation knowledge, and it is valued for what it records of fermenting, pickling and storing before the chilli reached the peninsula. The Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje (증보산림경제), an expanded compendium of rural household economy of the eighteenth century, treats cooking as one part of the management of land, stores and season. The Gyuhap Chongseo (규합총서), written by Lady Bingheogak Yi and dated 1809, is the household encyclopaedia of the women's quarters, ordering knowledge of food, fermentation, clothing and medicine for the mistress of the house. The Siui Jeonseo (시의전서), a late nineteenth-century manual of court and gentry cooking, completes the sequence and is a principal witness to the dishes and the vocabulary of the table at the end of the dynasty. Read together, these books show a cuisine in which fermented soybean and grain, vegetables, preserved fish and careful seasoning were already organised by method, and in which the Korean chilli, Capsicum annuum, is absent from the earliest sources and prominent only in the later ones. Temple cooking enters this record by a different road, chiefly through practice handed from teacher to student rather than through household books. Its method is the cooking of the vegetable and the ferment: seasonal wild greens, roots, mushrooms, seaweed, tofu and grain, seasoned with doenjang, ganjang, sesame and perilla, Perilla frutescens, and with kimchi made without fish sauce or salted seafood. Joanne Lee Molinaro, in The Korean Vegan Cookbook, shows how far the Korean table can be cooked without meat or fish, and her book is useful here as a modern author's account of the vegan Korean kitchen rather than as a source for the history of the temples. Two later acts of recognition frame the inheritance. The royal court cuisine of Joseon was designated an Important Intangible Cultural Heritage of Korea, with a line of named holders who received the knowledge of the palace kitchens and passed it on. UNESCO inscribed kimjang, the making and sharing of kimchi, on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013, recognising the communal autumn labour of the household, which rests on the same logic of salting, fermenting and storing that the old texts describe.

The temple table is built on the savour of fermented soybean, the oil of sesame and perilla, and the bitterness and fragrance of wild and seasonal greens, with the pungent alliums set aside. Its seasoning relies on doenjang, ganjang and the sweetness of root vegetables and mushrooms, and its kimchi is made without salted seafood, so that the flavour comes from vegetable, salt and ferment alone.