The Salt Pans of Sinan

Sinan is a scattering of islands off the south-western coast of the peninsula, in South Jeolla Province, where the West Sea retreats across wide tidal flats twice a day. The salt made there is sun-dried sea salt, cheonilyeom (천일염), raked from shallow pans laid out on the flats, and the county is the country's largest centre of its production. The industry in its present form belongs to the twentieth century, and its history runs through the years of Japanese rule (1910–1945), the war (1950–1953) and the division, which shaped where and how salt was made on the peninsula.

The West Sea has one of the largest tidal ranges in the world, and the flats that it uncovers are fine, level and slow to drain. These are the conditions that make solar salt possible. Seawater is let into a series of shallow pans, where sun and wind drive off the water by stages until the brine is strong enough to crystallise on a clay or tiled floor. The salt is raked into heaps and carried to a store, where it is left to stand so that the bittern, the bitter liquor rich in magnesium, drains away from the crystals. This resting is where the salt lives or dies for the kitchen: salt taken too fresh from the pan is harsh and wet, and salt that has drained for a long season is mild, dry and faintly sweet. The cooking of Korea is built on salt in more ways than almost any other table. Maangchi — Real Korean Cooking treats coarse sea salt as the basis of kimchi, the first step in which is to salt the napa cabbage (Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis) in leaf and in brine until it bends without breaking. Fine sea salt seasons the namul and the soups, while the fermented salts of the peninsula, ganjang, doenjang and the jeotgal, begin with brine made from the same crystals. A cook who understands the grain of the salt can judge how long a cabbage will take to wilt and how much it will give up, and so how the kimchi will ferment. The pans themselves belong to the wider economy of the West Sea. The flats that yield salt also yield the small fish, shrimp and shellfish from which the jeotgal are made, among them the salted shrimp, saeujeot, that goes into the kimchi of the western and southern provinces. Salt, tidal flat and fermentation are one system, and the cooking of Jeolla, which is the most abundant on the peninsula, rests on it. The rice plains lie inland of the same coast, and the table of the region is largely the meeting of those plains with the sea. The salt of this coast is also bound up with the history of the twentieth century. Under Japanese rule the manufacture of salt on the peninsula was brought under colonial control, and after the division of 1945 and the war the south relied more heavily on its western pans. Korean law has since recognised solar salt as a food in its own right, and the produce of the Sinan flats is sold under the name of the county. The salt is not simply a seasoning here; it is the stored work of sun, wind and tide, and Korean cooks have long chosen it by its age, its dryness and the clean edge of its taste.

Sun-dried salt that has stood and drained tastes clean, faintly sweet and only lightly bitter, which lets the other flavours of the table show. It salts the cabbage for kimchi, seasons the namul and the soups, and makes the brine for the ganjang and the jeotgal that follow.