Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje and Joseon Farm Households

The Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje is an enlarged revision of the Sallim Gyeongje, a household and farming compendium of the Joseon period, and it belongs to the long tradition of agricultural and domestic manuals written for the Korean landed household. It is read alongside the Sanga Yorok and the Gyuhap Chongseo as a witness to how the Joseon farm household fed itself, preserved its harvest and ordered its year.

The Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje is not a cookbook in the sense that the Eumsik Dimibang of Lady Jang Gye-hyang (1670) is one. It is a work of household economy, and its attention falls on the farm: the crops, the seasons of labour, the keeping of stores and the management of a household that had to live from what its own land produced. The cooking that appears in it is the cooking of provision, in which a dish is the end of a chain of cultivation, curing and storage. For the student of Korean food this is its value, because it shows the kitchen as part of the farm and not apart from it. The foundations of the Joseon farm table are those that the cooking of Korea still rests on. Rice and other grains formed the base of the meal, and beside them stood the fermented soy products, the pastes and sauces made from soybeans, and the salted and fermented vegetables that carried a household through winter. Korean radish (Raphanus sativus), napa cabbage (Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis) and perilla (Perilla frutescens) were garden crops of this kind, and the preserving of them was a task fixed to the calendar. The manuals of the period treat such preserving as a matter of foresight, and the cook who read them was expected to think in months and seasons rather than in single meals. The Korean chilli (Capsicum annuum) belongs to a later chapter of the same story. It came into the Korean kitchen after the sixteenth century, and the red kimchi and the chilli pastes that Maangchi's Real Korean Cooking presents as the ordinary base of the home table are the product of that long development. A modern home cook following Maangchi will recognise in the farm household of the Joseon texts the same logic: a pantry of fermented and dried things, made in season, from which the daily meal is assembled with little added at the last moment. The farm household and the court stood at different ends of the same system. The court kitchen worked with the best of the provinces gathered into the capital, while the farm household worked with what a single holding could yield, and the two shared the same staples and the same methods of fermentation and preservation. Reading the Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje beside the court records and the women's manuals, the Sanga Yorok and the Gyuhap Chongseo of Lady Bingheogak Yi (1809), gives the cook a fuller picture than any one of them gives alone. It is the farm household that explains where the ingredients of the grander tables came from, and why the discipline of storing, salting and fermenting stands so near the centre of Korean cooking.

The flavour of the Joseon farm table is the flavour of the pantry: the salt and depth of fermented soybean paste and sauce, the sourness of fermented vegetables, the sweetness of grain and root, and the fragrance of perilla. Chilli enters the picture later and adds heat to a table already built on fermentation, which is why the base of Korean seasoning is better understood through the farm manuals than through any single dish.