Gyuhap Chongseo of Lady Bingheogak Yi

The Gyuhap Chongseo (규합총서) is a household encyclopaedia compiled in 1809 by Lady Bingheogak Yi, a woman of the Joseon yangban class. It belongs to the late Joseon period, when domestic knowledge was written down by the women who practised it, and it stands beside the Eumsik Dimibang of Lady Jang Gye-hyang (1670) as one of the two great texts of the Korean women's kitchen.

The Gyuhap Chongseo is not a cookbook alone. Its title may be rendered as a compendium for the women's quarters, and its chapters range across the work of the household: the making of wine and vinegar, the preparation of food, sewing and dyeing, the rearing of silkworms, medicine, and the care of the newborn. Food and drink occupy a substantial part of the whole, and it is this part that cooks and historians return to. The text records the foundations of the Korean table as they stood in the early nineteenth century: the fermented sauces and pastes, the preserved vegetables, the rice cakes, the confections, the noodles and the gruel, together with methods for brewing and for keeping food through the seasons. Its value to a cook lies in the method set down for the household's own use rather than for the court. It describes the table of a landed family, and so preserves the ordinary grammar of Joseon household cooking: how a paste is set, how a vegetable is salted and kept, how a dish is seasoned with soy sauce, salt, sesame, pepper and vinegar. That it was written by a woman for women is part of its standing, and the book fixes in writing knowledge that had been handed on by demonstration. The book also stands within the history of the Korean chilli. The Korean chilli, Capsicum annuum, reached the peninsula only in the late sixteenth century, and the Joseon household manuals belong to the long transition from the pale, salt-seasoned kimchi of earlier centuries towards the red kimchi now familiar. A cook reading it today should treat it as a record of a kitchen in motion, not as a fixed canon. For the modern cook the book is read alongside later authors. Maangchi, in Maangchi's Big Book of Korean Cooking, sets out fermented pastes, kimchi and everyday dishes of the Korean home kitchen, which the cook may set beside the older household literature. The Gyuhap Chongseo remains, with the Eumsik Dimibang, a principal written witness that Korean domestic cooking was a learned and recorded craft long before the modern cookbook.