The Dosirak and the Packed Meal

The packed meal is older than the word dosirak. Rice carried to the field, the market road or the mountain was the ordinary provision of a farming people, and the Joseon-period household sent its men out with cooked grain wrapped in cloth or held in a lidded vessel of wood, gourd or woven willow. The container changed with the century: the lacquered and wooden box gave way to the aluminium and then the plastic lunch box, and the metal box of the postwar schoolroom, warmed on a stove before the midday meal, belongs to the years after the division and the war of 1950 to 1953. The practice travelled abroad with the Korean emigrations of the twentieth century, and the lunch box opened in an American school belongs to the diaspora story.

The dosirak (도시락) is a meal set in advance and eaten away from the house. Everything the bapsang arranges on the floor or the table, the bowl of rice, the soup, the banchan, must be reduced to a single closed container and made to survive hours without heat. That constraint decides the food. Rice is packed firm and level, and the side dishes are those that keep and travel: kimchi, dried or seasoned anchovies, soy-braised beef or quail eggs, seasoned vegetables, a fried egg or a slice of egg roll. There is no soup, and the cheop count of the formal table gives way to what the lid will hold. The order of the bapsang is not abandoned, only folded. Rice remains the ground of the meal and the other things are its accompaniment, set in compartments or at the edge so that their juices do not run into the grain. Kimchi is the difficulty, since its brine and odour reach everything near it, and the packer's care is chiefly spent here: drained well, cut small, sometimes sealed apart. A common practice in the schoolroom and office is to shake the box before opening, so that rice, seasoned laver, kimchi and a spoonful of gochujang are mixed together in the lid itself. The meal is eaten with a spoon and chopsticks, as at home, and the lunch is usually taken in company, each person's box a small display of the household that packed it. In the diaspora the packed meal took another meaning. Edward Lee, in Smoke and Pickles, writes of a Korean-American upbringing and a Southern kitchen, and the lunch box is where many children of Korean households first noticed the difference between what is eaten at home and what is eaten at school. The same rice and kimchi that are ordinary in one room are remarked on in another. The dosirak has also a ceremonial side. It is carried on outings, to the mountains and to the ancestral graves, and it is the meal of the examination day, when a parent prepares it with particular attention. It has no fixed order of dishes and no rule of precedence, unlike the jesa or the doljanchi, yet it carries the same assumption as they do: that a meal is something one household prepares for the care of another person, and that rice is the form that care takes.

The flavour of the dosirak is the flavour of food eaten at room temperature, so salt, soy, sesame oil and the sourness of kimchi are set a little higher than at the hot table, and rice is valued for the firm, slightly sweet grain that cold does not spoil. Seasoned laver, braised soy dishes and egg give the box its savoury centre, and the contrast of a sharp kimchi against plain rice is the pleasure of the whole.