Kimchi: An Origin Story
This is Korean chile powder, also called gochugaru. Gochugaru literally translates to chile pepper powder.
I would like to give special thanks to my friend and former student Paul, as he helped me understand a number of nuances in Korean pre-colonial and colonial history, culture, and the aspects of Korean language relevant to this post. He also did this with zero notice that I needed help beyond a from-out-of-nowhere text from me asking for some assistance understanding the rhetorical intent of a source I was reading. I didn’t even quote or list the source! Paul’s help was invaluable in giving me a better understanding of kimchi’s history, particularly given my general lack of expertise in the histories or cultures of any Southeast Asian nations or peoples, let alone that of Korea. Other than the standard, ubiquitous empire studies education that minimally references Korea, anything involving Korea is way outside the regions I typically study. Thanks, Paul!
Kimchis are probably my favorites of the vegetable ferments world. There are hundreds of different types of kimchi, and I personally would like to try them all! Generally speaking, kimchi can be defined (since around the 19th-century) as vegetable ferments that usually (but not always) contain gochugaru (not always with cabbage). Usually, gochugaru references Korean chile pepper powder, but it can instead refer to the Cheong-yang chile. This second one is basically the same, except a lot spicier. Cheong-yang chile tends to be around 7x hotter than standard Korean chile is. For Americans, cabbage-based kimchi is going to be what most people have tried, if they’ve tried any kind of kimchi. Oi sobagi (cucumber) kimchi is my favorite, though also the type I eat the least of. I’m also really fond of kkaenip-kimchi (perilla leaf), though I no longer grow this plant to make it. All of this said, because there are and have always been kimchis that do not have gochugaru in them, we’re really looking at “fermented veg” to answer the “what is kimchi?” question. For anyone interested, contemporary “white kimchi” is a product developed by Japanese chefs in Korea during the 1980s. There are other white kimchis, or rather, kimchis that do not contain chile, but we’re largely going to ignore those for the purposes of this post.
Near as I can tell, you can pretty much eat kimchi with any savory food. Although I most commonly eat kimchi with a bowl of plain rice, I often have some with random other foods, including delicately flavored fish. I rarely eat Korean food these days, other than kimchi, because I’m no longer in a part of Houston with good Korean food and because I don’t know how to make the things I like myself (yet). Bowl of rice with kimchi, though, is where it’s at for me in the absence of the full meal those might otherwise come with; it’s a super simple and soothing dish on a hard day. I only have probably another litre or so of kimchi in my fridge, and had planned to go buy some Napa cabbage to make a new batch, but now I am going to wait until I see what Dave from Happy Acres Blog tells us on Wednesday that we need from the grocery store to make his kohlrabi kimchi: if you missed this info, we have a guest blogger authoring our Wednesday post! Y’all go check out some of Dave’s writing and you’ll know what a cool opportunity this is for all of us! Thank you, Dave, not only for helping me out with my busted wrists situation, but also for providing us the chance to learn from you as well. It means a lot!
This is the baechu (Napa) kimchi in my fridge. It is not a pogi kimchi, because I did not leave the head of cabbage intact. I cut the carrots big, for textural reasons. I admit with zero shame that although I have gochugaru in my house, I use the kimchi kit we sell for my own kimchi and that of the friends I make it for. It’s a massive time saver and is ridiculously tasty, which I need in my life more than I can articulate. Poor Sabrina always has to send me new kits, since I like ours too much to mix the various ingredients up myself. Unrelatedly, I just noticed that I see in this picture that Child Tester did not wipe down the table after dinner as she was meant to. Busted!
Ancient History
Although there is still quite a lot of dispute about kimchi history, there is documentation and agreement that it existed as early as the Three Kingdoms period (57BCE - 668CE). The Three Kingdoms of Korea was a set of three separate kingdoms, the Goguryeo (from which the name Korea derives), the Baekje, and the Silla that occupied the entire Korean peninsula and a massive swath of Manchuria (Manchuria is located in modern day China and Russia). There were many other tribal holdings in the area during this time as well, but these three empires were large and dominant enough that the period is named for them. During this time, a Chinese work called Records of the Three Kingdoms was published in 289CE, and it details the existence of kimchi therein. Kimchi changes over the centuries, and its most common form now, made with Chinese cabbage, is most heavily popularized in the late 19th-century. Actually, it doesn’t get Chinese/Napa cabbage at all until the 19th-century, but was made with other cabbages before that. Generally, there were different cabbages used during different seasons. There are still other cabbages made into kimchi, such as yangbaechu (green cabbage) kimchi.
These pictures indicate linguistic history of kimchi in Korea in 963CE. There is dispute as to whether kimchi was adapted from Japanese or Chinese vegetable preservation techniques or if kimchi has a uniquely Korean origin. The authors of this study make a convincing argument that kimchi is, in fact, uniquely Korean. Many other studies also clearly demonstrate that kimchi can only be uniquely Korean in its origin. The work pictured here is different from the Chinese one mentioned above, and is written around 700 years later.
It’s All About That Chile; Not Cabbage
The single largest point of contention regarding kimchi is about the use of chile. Prevailing wisdom states that the Imjinwaeran (Japanese invasion of 1592) happens, and woot, Korea gets chiles! These chiles would originally have gotten to Japan from Portuguese traders/colonizers who were trading from India (Goa principally, but also Damão and Diu), under this narrative. However, this history becomes a bit complicated when you start looking at written records. Chile does not become the dominant feature of kimchi until the 19th-century, but does get used sometime between the beginning of European colonization and the earlier days of Japan’s colonial attempts against Korea. Japan does eventually colonize Korea in 1910. With Japanese surrender in 1945, Korea was released from Japan’s brutal occupation.
The need for chiles for kimchi is particularly true in the parts of Korea with reduced access to salt, because the chiles make up the preserving difference reduced quantities of salt would require. There are also some yogurts that are traditionally made by soaking chiles in milk, and other forms of using chile specifically for its preservation powers are found in several parts of the world.
Some sources I looked at indicated there was a different kind of chile already grown in Korea that was used prior to the introduction of gochugaru during the Imjinwaeran, but I was unable to access their source materials at all. What I did find, however, was a contemporary study of old kimchi recipes, and the earliest one they list is published in 1552 with chiles has two kinds of peppers in it. I can’t quite tell if these are chiles or peppers, which are botanically and culinarily different. Before that, I saw no references to chiles in recipes from the 1450s until 1552 (there’s a century of records gap in this particular study). So yes, it does appear that although it is still truth that Portuguese colonial trade brought chiles to Korea (never in dispute), it may not have initially happened through Japanese invasions. My own view is that those from Japanese invasions were probably not the first chiles Koreans had seen. We already know that trade existed between India and Korea, so it’s hard to imagine that chiles magically never got to be part of that economic link between the two.
The reason we’re talking about and seeing disputes about chiles is because the view that the acquisition of gochugaru is the point at which kimchi becomes kimchi is a very serious problem. It makes explicit the common, implicit-but-erroneous belief that kimchi is a Japanese product that Koreans adapted to their cuisine. In other instances (when we’re talking about pre-chile kimchi), China gets credited with kimchi, but that’s also not true. Kimchi is a uniquely Korean product, whether a given kimchi contains chiles or not. I think it’s important to state this, because all peoples have a right to have their cultural icons acknowledged as their own.
It is also true, despite a lot of dispute over this, that cabbage kimchis were popular well before the last hundred or so years. Napa cabbage, the current most popular type of cabbage used in Korea for kimchi, was introduced in the late 19th-century, but there is evidence of other cabbages in the region for several thousand years (since circa 2030BCE, from India), including references to kimchi (not quite for thousandS of years on that part). Food history is nearly always colonial history, so things can get complicated really quickly.
We’re largely going to ignore the cabbage component of the kimchi debates, because we know for sure they had cabbages and we know for sure they made kimchi, so we also can reasonably extrapolate (also with help of records on this) that Koreans preserved whatever cabbages they were growing in a given locality and time frame. Per literally every culture with fermented cabbages as an established part of their national, regional, and/or tribal cuisines.
“Historical writings showing: (A) jo (菹) referring to kimchi; and (B) sung (菘) referring to cabbage in the Hunmongjahoe (訓蒙字會) by Choi (崔世珍; 1343)” (Ibid). Cabbage? Check. Kimchi? Check. All from 1343CE.
Traditionally, kimchis were fermented buried in the ground or hung in wells so as to keep them cooler and keep them longer. There were also “water kimchis,” and these use weaker brines instead and frequently contain or are exclusively made from radishes.
Worth noting here is the fact that up until the invention of kimchi fridges, seasonal kimchis were preserved and eaten. Now, people can eat out of season kimchis, due to these cool kimchi refrigerators! People can also keep kimchi around a lot longer with refrigeration, because otherwise you are getting 8 days tops out of an opened and/or warm container of kimchi before it’s too sour to eat. This meant you had to make it all the time, keep it buried, or similar.
When discussing my own preparation of kimchi on the phone with Paul, he expressed surprise that I age mine for 2-3 months. 1 week is the norm, but I find that the sourness abates and more flavor nuances appear with longer ageing. I personally would not want to eat a kimchi that’d been fermenting 4-6 weeks, however, because the Goldilocks Zone isn’t. I keep my apartment somewhere in the 70-73 range, for the most part, for those interested in playing with longer aged kimchi that may want that info. I also don’t think I would have thought to age mine that long if I hadn’t also been accustomed to doing so with fermented cabbages hailing from more temperate regions of the world when I started making kimchi. All of that said, it appears that although long-ageing kimchi is not normative in Korea, some people do age it for up to 6 months.
I didn’t know I needed a kimchi fridge until I started writing this post, but I do. From everything I read, LG makes some particularly nice ones.
At this point, it makes the most sense to skip on forward to the 20th-century. Although this is an oversimplification, what basically happens during the hundreds of years we’re ignoring substantive detail on is that over time, chile becomes a bigger deal in kimchi. This is, also in oversimplified form, what is seen throughout Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent: a massive scale-up of chile use in a majority of the continent’s cuisines. Portugal brings chiles, people love chiles. Hard to see why not, personally, as a massive fan of chile! So over this few hundred years, you see chile become much more ubiquitous in kimchi preparations.
Enter the 20th and 21st
In the 20th-century, you see kimchi exit stage left and enter the global arena. Kimchi spreads in popularity, ultimately not only travelling the globe, but becoming synonymous with Korean food in global perspectives on her cuisine. This also brings some interesting historical events, as generally is the case with travelling food products.
During the war in Vietnam, the South Korean government commissioned scientists to create kimchi for soldiers in a plant near Seoul. In the summer of 1966, “kimchi-in-tin” products were finally shipped and served to the Korean troops in Vietnam. This was the first mass production of kimchi on a modern industrial scale, and was based on scientific research on its long history of kimchi in Korea. The first academic research paper about the science of kimchi, exploration on the phenomenon of kimchi fermentation, the food value of kimchi, and its function to human diet and so forth, was presented to the 2nd. International Conference of Food Science and Technology in Warsaw, Poland, in August 1966. It was also acknowledged as the first original research paper about kimchi in English. Thus, kimchi has been a part of the global cuisine for almost four decades. At present, there are more than 400 industrial kimchi manufacturers in South Korea alone. Although, the exact volume of kimchi production is not known in North Korea, it is probably no less than that of South Korea.
I didn’t know about this, but it’s a really interesting way to see kimchi entering the global arena!
It’s worth noting, also, that in 1996 there was a huge dispute between Korea and Japan over kimchi. What happened is that Japanese factories started making a Japanese version of kimchi that was not made the Korean way, despite being sold under this label. This results in massive protests and lobbying the Commission for kimchi’s inclusion in the Codex Alimentarius. They get this inclusion in 2001, but in 2013 and 2015, South and North Korea (respectively) gain inclusion in the UNESCO Lists of Intangible Heritage for the manufacture and sharing of kimchi. What this UNESCO list does is state unequivocally that a given cultural norm (often intangible, such as national/tribal dances and songs) is representative solely of a given culture. Although both North and South Korea have other objects and practices of cultural significance on this list, kimchi was a massive win for these nations. The Codex also specifies particulars of production for a kimchi to be included in the legal designation. There are, if you didn’t know, a bunch of global foods that fall into these certified categories.
In some instances, Koreans face discrimination from its neighbors through kimchi boycotts. In 2017, China was angry with South Korea for agreeing to house an American missile system, so they responded by boycotting kimchi. They boycotted other South Korean stuff, too, like concerts performed by Korean bands, and for Korean-Chinese people, the discrimination faced from Chinese nationalists became rather extreme, both due to boycotts and sweeping protests against Korean businesses in China.
Also, in 2014, the Seoul Kimchi Festival (서울김장문화제) was instituted, also called the Kimchi Making & Sharing Festival. This has happened annually in the fall for 5 years. I really hope they can have their festival this year, and I hope one day to go to one of them! Here’s a video from last year’s festival in November. Kimchi sharing is a cultural norm, and this festival represents that: all kimchi produced during this festival goes to those in need of kimchi. It is all shared! Most kimchi produced in modernity is now done commercially, but this video shows how eagerly people participate in making and sharing parties! Kimchi is love, y’all. Love in a jar.
This video shows other aspects of the festival, such as a space where people can taste 100 different types of kimchi. The festival includes kimchi makers from all over the world who come solely to participate in the shared love of kimchi.
There are still so many kinds of kimchi I want to talk about, as well as other aspects of kimchi history! Because the history of kimchi is in part also the “history of a Korean soul” and because of the vast number of regional differences in kimchi preparation, this is a situation where I probably could go on for post after post after post. As such, I’m closing with the hope that you all will incorporate kimchis into your daily lives, and a video showing you more of the stuff I hoped to be able to discuss in length. If you only watch one of the videos in this post, let it be this next one.
