The Written Record of the Joseon Kitchen

The Joseon dynasty ruled the Korean peninsula from 1392 until 1910, and its capital at Hanyang, today's Seoul, was the seat of a court kitchen whose practice, together with that of the yangban households around it, left the earliest substantial written record of Korean cooking. The surviving texts, among them the Eumsik Dimibang of Lady Jang Gye-hyang (1670) and the Gyuhap Chongseo of Lady Bingheogak Yi (1809), were written in the households of the learned class, and they allow the cuisine to be read as a document as well as eaten as a table.

The written record of the Joseon kitchen begins with the Eumsik Dimibang, compiled by Lady Jang Gye-hyang in 1670 and generally counted the earliest cookery book in Korea written in the Korean script by a woman. It sets down the preparation of grains, noodles, meats, fish, pickles, jang, wines and sweetmeats as they were kept in a provincial scholar's household, and it treats fermentation and the seasoning of food as matters of exact practice. The Gyuhap Chongseo, written by Lady Bingheogak Yi in 1809, is a household encyclopedia, and its sections on wine, on jang, on kimchi and on cooked dishes show a kitchen that had by then settled into recognisable forms. The Siui Jeonseo, a later compendium of food and household management, is usually read beside these two when the repertoire of the late dynasty is described, and the three together give the cook a continuous account of what was made and how. The jang and kimchi are the grammar of this record. Doenjang, ganjang and gochujang, made from fermented soybean and later seasoned with the Korean chilli (Capsicum annuum), supply salt, depth and body to nearly every dish, while kimchi, made from napa cabbage (Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis) and Korean radish (Raphanus sativus), preserves the vegetable harvest through the winter. The chilli reached the peninsula in the later Joseon period, and the red kimchi now taken as standard belongs to that part of the history; the earlier pickles were salted and seasoned without it. A cook who understands these two families of ferment understands why the cuisine tastes as it does, and Maangchi's Big Book of Korean Cooking builds its recipes upon them. The table that the court and the households set rested on the banchan principle: rice and soup at the centre, with a number of small dishes of vegetable, fish, meat and pickle set around them to be eaten together. The royal table multiplied the dishes according to rank, but the structure was the same as that of the household meal. The regions shaped what filled the dishes: Seoul and Gyeonggi the refined court cooking, Jeolla the abundant and heavily seasoned table of its farmland and coast, Gyeongsang the saltier and spicier cooking of the south-east, Gangwon the mountain and east-sea foods, Jeju the cooking of an island with its own produce and seafood, and the North a cooler cuisine of grains and milder seasoning. The temple tradition kept a separate discipline, cooking without meat, fish or the pungent alliums, and relied on the jang, on wild greens and on pickles for its flavour. The Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945 ended the dynasty's court and disrupted the households that had kept its recipes, and the colonial period also brought hardship to the table through the requisition of rice and the strain on farming families. The war of 1950 to 1953 and the division of the peninsula that followed scattered people and ingredients, and separated the northern cooking from that of the south. Out of those decades came the cooking of ordinary households and, with emigration, the Korean tables of the United States and elsewhere, a story told by the Korean-American cookbooks of Maangchi, David Chang, Joanne Lee Molinaro, Roy Choi and Edward Lee. The 1988 Seoul Olympics placed Korean food before an international audience, and the export of the cuisine since then has rested on the same foundations that the Joseon texts record: the jang, kimchi, and the shared table of rice, soup and banchan. A cook who reads the Eumsik Dimibang and the Gyuhap Chongseo beside a modern recipe will recognise the continuity, and will understand that the written record is the reason the cuisine can be followed from the court kitchen to the present household.

The flavour of the Joseon table is the flavour of the ferment: the salt and savoury depth of doenjang and ganjang, the heat of gochugaru, and the sourness of ripened kimchi. Set against plain steamed rice, these seasonings give the small dishes of the banchan their balance, and the temple kitchen shows how far that depth can be taken without meat or fish.