The Upland Peninsula and the Mountain Table

Roughly seventy per cent of the Korean peninsula is mountain or hill country, a spine running down the eastern side from the Taebaek range and falling away in long folds towards the west and south. The cooking of Korea was formed by this relief: narrow valleys and basins gave rice and barley where water could be held, the slopes gave wild greens, roots, nuts and mushrooms, and three seas of different character washed the coast on every other side.

Because arable land was scarce and the winters long, the Korean table came to depend on what could be gathered from the hills and then kept. Mountain greens such as bracken (gosari), aster (chwinamul) and royal fern were boiled, dried in the sun and rehydrated for namul through the cold months, and the same logic governs the jars of doenjang (된장), ganjang and gochujang that stand in the courtyard. Salting, fermenting and drying are the answer of an upland people to a short growing season, and the cook who follows Maangchi's Big Book of Korean Cooking will find them running through its vegetable, soup and kimchi chapters alike. The plains are the exception, and they carry the weight of the grain. The alluvial lowlands of Jeolla in the south-west and of Gyeonggi around the Han River are the rice country of the peninsula, and Icheon rice, a registered Korean Geographical Indication from Gyeonggi, belongs to that tradition. Rice is the measure of the meal: the word for cooked rice, bap, also means the meal itself, and soup, banchan and jjigae are arranged around the bowl. Jeolla is remembered above all for the abundance of its banchan, a table built on a rich agricultural hinterland and a coast close at hand. The coasts divide naturally into three. The West Sea, shallow and tidal, leaves wide flats along the Jeolla and Chungcheong shores, from which come small shellfish, octopus and the salted fish and shrimp (jeotgal) that season kimchi. Off Sinan in the south-west lie the salt pans that produce the sun-dried sea salt on which the kitchen relies, and Sinan sun-dried salt is among the registered names of the region. The East Sea is deep and cold, and its great catches are walleye pollock (Gadus chalcogrammus), eaten fresh, frozen, dried as hwangtae in the high winter winds of Gangwon, or salted as the roe of myeongnanjeot, and the squid (ojingeo) of the same waters, which is grilled, dried or dressed. The South Sea, broken into islands and inlets, is the home of the anchovy (myeolchi), whose dried form is the foundation of the everyday stock of the peninsula, and of the largehead hairtail (Trichiurus lepturus) grilled or simmered with radish. Jeju, the volcanic island to the south, keeps a table of its own. Its women divers, the haenyeo, work the shallows without breathing apparatus and bring up abalone (Haliotis discus hannai), conch, sea urchin and seaweed, and the island's abalone porridge, juk, is a dish of the sea made soft and plain. Its basalt soil favours tangerines, radish and barley rather than paddy, and the cooking is lighter in seasoning than that of the mainland. In the north-east, the Gangwon highlands are too cold and steep for much rice, and the staples there are potato and buckwheat. Buckwheat is made into cold noodles (memil guksu) and pancakes, and the potato into noodles, pancakes and the dumpling known as gamja-ongsimi. Further south, the hill towns have long grown ginseng, Panax ginseng. Geumsan in South Chungcheong is the best known centre of its trade, and Geumsan ginseng and Punggi ginseng, from North Gyeongsang, both hold Geographical Indication status. Cultivated slowly in shaded beds, the root enters the cooking in chicken soup (samgyetang), in tea and in the long-simmered broths of the winter table.

The taste of the upland table is one of depth rather than sweetness: the savour of fermented soybean, the faint bitterness of dried mountain greens, the clean salinity of sun-dried salt and the umami of dried anchovy stock. Buckwheat gives a grassy, earthy note to Gangwon noodles, ginseng a bitter-sweet fragrance to broth, and the sea contributes brine and sweetness in the shellfish and pollock of the coasts.