Kimchi-bokkeumbap (Kimchi Fried Rice)

Kimchi has gone into soups, kimchi rice, noodles, mung bean pancakes and dumplings for a long time, but kimchi fried rice is a newer idea. The folk encyclopedia's entry, by food researcher Park Chae-rin, ties it to two things the old Korean kitchen lacked: cheap cooking oil and a light pan with a handle. A heavy iron cauldron set over a fire hole suited steaming and boiling, and traditional bokkeum meant cooking with a little oil in the ingredients' own juices. Quick, high-heat stir-frying, the entry argues, spread only with foreign influences after the ports opened in the late 19th century.

A 1924 cookbook, Joseon musang sinsik yori jebeop, already gives "fry rice" as a Western dish made with butter in a pot, but most Koreans met fried rice in the Chinese restaurants of the colonial period, which held public cooking classes in the 1930s; a 1939 Dong-A Ilbo article gave lard-fried rice with egg, mushrooms or pork. Oil and frying pans reached ordinary homes from the 1960s, when fried rice was promoted as a simple one-dish meal in diet-improvement campaigns. A 1965 Chosun Ilbo recipe used stir-fried kimchi cooked on top of leftover rice, and a 1972 Dong-A Ilbo article, calling it a Gyeongsang dish, stir-fried kimchi with pork belly, gochujang, garlic and ginger before tossing in cold rice — essentially today's method.

It became truly everyday in the 1980s, when kimchi was plentiful enough to cook with freely and kimchi recipes were promoted ahead of the 1986 Asian Games. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, campus cafés and pubs sold it cheaply at lunch, and a 1989 hit song by Byun Jin-sub name-checks it in its lyrics. Iron-griddle chains made a griddle version fashionable in the 1990s, and frying rice in the pan after a meal of grilled meat or dakgalbi remains a habit. See cooking bap, bokkeum stir-frying and food in modern Korea.

• Vegetables from the kimchi: napa cabbage kimchi is a source of vitamin K and adds fiber to a rice dish. See fermented foods.
• Thrifty and balanced: it turns leftover rice and over-sour kimchi into a one-bowl meal with protein from the egg and pork.
• Easy to lighten: more kimchi and onion, less rice, and a lean protein shift the balance toward vegetables.

• Home style: sour, older baechu-kimchi and a splash of its juice, a little pork or whatever protein is at hand, and a fried egg on top.
• Gyeongsang style (1972 recipe): kimchi stir-fried with pork belly, gochujang, garlic and ginger before the rice goes in.
• Iron-griddle (cheolpan) style: cooked on a hot griddle until the rice crisps at the edges, popularized by griddle restaurant chains in the 1990s.
• After-meal fried rice: rice, chopped kimchi and gim fried in the leftover sauce and fat of dakgalbi, grilled meat or a braise.