The Sanga Yorok and the Household Kitchen

The Sanga Yorok (the title may be rendered as the essential records of the household) is a Joseon-period manual of domestic cooking and housekeeping, and it belongs to the tradition of the Joseon household manuals that includes the Eumsik Dimibang of Lady Jang Gye-hyang (1670) and the Gyuhap Chongseo of Lady Bingheogak Yi (1809). It records the kitchen of the yangban household, where the mistress governed the stores, the fermentation jars and the ritual table.

The Sanga Yorok is read here as a witness to the household kitchen rather than the palace kitchen. The court tables are documented in the Joseon court records, but the daily cooking of a family of standing rested on a different body of knowledge: the keeping of grain, the making of soy sauce and doenjang, the salting of vegetables and fish, and the preparation of dishes for ancestral rites and for guests. Texts of this kind were written by and for the women who ran these kitchens, and they are the reason that so much of the method is known at all. The household manuals share a character. The Eumsik Dimibang, written by Lady Jang Gye-hyang in 1670, is generally counted as the earliest surviving cookery book in Hangul by a woman, and it attends closely to fermentation, brewing and the handling of meat and noodles. The Gyuhap Chongseo of Lady Bingheogak Yi, of 1809, extends the same practice into a wider manual of household management. The Sanga Yorok sits within this tradition, and together these texts describe a kitchen organised by season, by the calendar of rites and by the condition of the storehouse. The larger agricultural and household literature supplies the frame. The Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje, an expanded treatise on farm and household economy, places cooking inside the management of land, crops and stores, and the Siui Jeonseo, an anonymous cookery text of the late nineteenth century, belongs to the same tradition of prescriptive writing on food. Read together, these works show that the Korean kitchen was an economy before it was a repertoire: what was cooked followed from what had been grown, salted, dried and fermented. The modern authorities carry this knowledge into the present kitchen. Maangchi — Maangchi's Big Book of Korean Cooking presents the household cook's repertoire of kimchi, jjigae, banchan, rice and fermented seasonings in a form a capable cook can follow. The seasonings it builds on, gochujang, doenjang and soy sauce, are the products that the Joseon household made in its own jars. Two later recognitions bear on the same inheritance. Royal court cuisine was designated an important intangible cultural heritage in South Korea, with a line of designated holders who passed the court methods from one generation to the next. The making and sharing of kimchi, kimjang, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2013 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The household kitchen of these texts is built on fermented seasonings and salted preserves, so the flavour of the table is largely that of doenjang, ganjang, gochujang and kimchi, matured in jars through the year. Dishes were seasoned from these stores, which gave the everyday meal of rice, soup and banchan its savoury depth.