Kimchi in Hawaiʻi and Los Angeles

The Korean table reached the Pacific by two routes. The first was the migration to the Hawaiian Islands, which began in 1903 and brought Korean labourers to the sugar plantations, a movement recorded in the Provenance research on the Pacific Migration Trail. The second was the larger settlement in Los Angeles in the later twentieth century, where kimchi became a fixture of a city with a large Korean community.

Kimchi travelled with the people who made it, and in Hawaiʻi it was first a food of the plantation camps. The Korean labourers who arrived from 1903 could not bring the full range of ingredients of the peninsula, and the cabbage, radish, salt and chilli of the home kitchen had to be replaced by what the islands and the plantation stores could supply. The practice of salting vegetables, seasoning them with chilli, garlic and ginger, and leaving them to ferment was carried over, while the vegetables and the proportions bent to the supply at hand. The Hawaiian kitchen did not keep Korean food apart. Korean cooking sat beside the Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Portuguese foods of the plantation communities, and the plate lunch of the islands, with its rice and its sides, left room for kimchi as one of those sides. The grilled and marinated meats of the Korean table found a place in the same mixed tradition, and kimchi was served with them as it would be at home, as the sharp, sour counterweight to rice and fat. Los Angeles belongs to a later and larger movement. After the United States changed its immigration law in 1965, Korean settlement in the city grew, and Koreatown became a district where the ingredients of the peninsula could again be bought in quantity: napa cabbage (Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis), Korean radish (Raphanus sativus), gochugaru and salted fish sauces. Kimchi could be made and sold on a scale the plantation camps never knew, and it became a commercial product as well as a household one. The Korean-American writers on whom this book draws show how the food then passed into the wider city. Roy Choi, in L.A. Son, writes of the Korean kitchen as one of several that shaped him in Los Angeles, and David Chang, in Momofuku, uses kimchi as a working ingredient in a kitchen that is not wholly Korean. Maangchi, in her Real Korean Cooking and Big Book of Korean Cooking, sets out the method for the home cook abroad, and Joanne Lee Molinaro, in The Korean Vegan Cookbook, shows how the fermentation can be kept while the fish sauce and salted shrimp of the traditional seasoning are left out. What the two places share is adaptation under constraint, and what separates them is scale. In Hawaiʻi kimchi was kept alive by necessity among labourers, and in Los Angeles it grew into a trade and then into an ingredient used by cooks of many backgrounds. In both, the dish remained a fermented, chilli-seasoned vegetable served with rice, and the changes lay in what was available to ferment and in who ate it.

Kimchi on the Pacific tables is eaten as it is on the peninsula, as a sour, salty and hot accompaniment to rice and to grilled meat. Its acidity cuts the richness of marinated beef and pork, and in Los Angeles it also enters stews, fried rice and other dishes cooked with it, where the fermented flavour deepens with the age of the kimchi.