Korean Cooking Carried to America

Korean cooking reached America in the early twentieth century, first with the Korean labourers who sailed to the plantations of Hawaii from 1903, and later, after the war of 1950 to 1953 and the division of the peninsula, with the far larger migration that followed the American immigration reforms of 1965. The cooking that travelled belonged to households, not to the court or the temple, and it was remade wherever its cooks settled and found different markets, different vegetables and different neighbours.

Edward Lee, in Smoke and Pickles, writes of Korean cooking from the position of a cook raised in Brooklyn by Korean parents and settled in Kentucky, and his book is the authority this entry rests on for the Korean-American story. Its subject is not the preservation of a national cuisine in its original form but the meeting of Korean technique with the larder of the American South. The pickle and the ferment, the two foundations of the Korean table, sit naturally beside the smokehouse and the vinegar jar of Southern cooking, and Lee builds his recipes on that common ground. The Korean elements he works with are those a capable cook will recognise from the earlier chapters of this book: doenjang (된장), gochujang, gochugaru, and the salted and fermented vegetables of the banchan table. In the American kitchen these meet corn, country ham, bourbon, sorghum, okra and the pork of the region. The method remains Korean in its reasoning, which is to let salt and time do the work of seasoning and preservation, while the ingredients belong to the place where the dish is cooked. The lineage that matters here is therefore one of adaptation within the home. The great texts of the Joseon period, the Eumsik Dimibang of Lady Jang Gye-hyang (1670) and the Gyuhap Chongseo of Lady Bingheogak Yi (1809), record a cooking carried from mother to daughter and set down for the household. The Korean cook in America inherited that habit of transmission, though often by memory and by taste rather than by written measure, and Lee's book belongs to that same tradition of the household cook who writes down what the family table taught. The settled history frames the whole. Hawaii received the first Korean workers, the peninsula then passed through Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945, the war and the division, and each stage sent further cooks and further ingredients across the Pacific. What Lee records is the result in one family and one region: a Korean table that has taken on the American South without losing the logic of fermentation on which it stands.

The flavour of Korean cooking in America rests on the salt, heat and sour depth of doenjang, gochujang and kimchi, set against the sweetness of corn and sorghum and the smoke of cured pork. The Korean seasoning carries the dish, and the Southern ingredient supplies the body.