The Imwon Gyeongji of Seo Yu-gu

The Imwon Gyeongji (임원경제지) is the encyclopaedic compendium of rural and gentry life compiled by Seo Yu-gu in the late Joseon period, in the same current of practical learning that produced the Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje and the Sanga Yorok. Its food sections belong to the agrarian household of the Korean peninsula, where grain, vegetables, fermented sauces and preserved fish governed the table.

Seo Yu-gu's work is a scholar's survey of how a household outside the court should live and provision itself, and cookery is only one of the matters it treats. Its method is that of the practical-learning writers of the later Joseon period: to gather what farmers, gardeners and housewives knew, set it in order and give it a place beside agronomy, medicine and household management. For the cook the interest lies in the food chapters, which treat the preservation of vegetables, the making of fermented soy and chilli pastes, the brewing of wines and the keeping of grains as a single domestic economy rather than as separate arts. The book matters to this library because it shows the Korean table as a system of provisioning. Kimchi, doenjang, ganjang and gochujang appear there as the stores on which a household lived through winter, and the logic of salting, fermenting and drying that Maangchi sets out for the modern kitchen in Maangchi's Big Book of Korean Cooking follows the same logic. Her pages on kimchi, on the soy-based seasonings and on the pantry of dried and pickled things are the present-day working form of what such compendia recorded for the Joseon household. It stands among the sources of this chapter in a particular rank. The Eumsik Dimibang of Lady Jang Gye-hyang (1670) and the Gyuhap Chongseo of Lady Bingheogak Yi (1809) are the cook's own texts, written from the kitchen and in the voice of a woman running one. The Imwon Gyeongji is the scholar's view of the same world, wider in scope and less intimate in manner, and it is read alongside them as a record of what a landed household was expected to know and to store. The cook who reads it with these companions gains a sense of continuity. The Korean chilli, Capsicum annuum, which came into the peninsula before this period, had by then become part of the seasoning of the pantry, and the preserved vegetables, the fermented pastes and the careful handling of salt that the compendia describe remain the structure of the table now. Seo Yu-gu is therefore a witness to a settled method, and the modern authorities confirm that the method has endured.

The flavour that these compendia describe is that of the preserved pantry: the salt and lactic sharpness of kimchi, the savoury depth of fermented soybean pastes and the heat of chilli once it joined the store. Maangchi's recipes carry the same balance into the modern kitchen, where doenjang, ganjang and gochugaru remain the base on which soups, stews and banchan are built.