How Chili Peppers Came to Korea

Few ingredients seem more fundamental to Korean cooking than gochu (고추), the chili pepper. Yet chilies are native to the Americas, and they arrived on the Korean peninsula comparatively recently, most likely in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. How they came, and how quickly they took hold, is still debated.

The first written record

The earliest Korean text generally accepted as describing the chili pepper is the Jibong yuseol (지봉유설), an encyclopedic miscellany compiled by the scholar Yi Su-gwang and completed in 1614. Yi calls the plant nammancho, "southern barbarian pepper," warns that it is strongly toxic, and records that it came from Japan, adding that it was therefore called waegyeoja, "Japanese mustard." He notes that people at the time added it to liquor, and that drinking it could be harmful. Nothing in the passage suggests it was yet a cooking staple.

Competing theories

Historians agree on the American origin of the plant but not on its route to Korea.

• Via Japan: the most widely cited view, based on the Jibong yuseol, holds that Portuguese traders brought chilies to Japan in the mid-sixteenth century and that they then reached Korea from Japan, often linked to the upheaval of the Japanese invasions of 1592–1598.
• Via Japan, or from Korea to Japan? Japanese sources complicate the picture. Some Edo-period Japanese texts say the chili came to Japan from Korea, which suggests that plants and names may have traveled in both directions, and possibly along more than one route.
• Via China: others propose an overland or continental introduction through China, where chilies had spread after the Age of Exploration.
• A native gochu? A minority of Korean researchers, notably the food scientist Kwon Dae-young and colleagues, have argued that a pungent native pepper existed in Korea long before the seventeenth century and that the Japan-introduction story is mistaken. This view is contested and is not the mainstream position among historians.

From curiosity to cornerstone

For most of the seventeenth century, Korean cookbooks show little sign of chili. Kimchi recipes in the Eumsik dimibang (around 1670), for example, season cucumbers, eggplants and other vegetables with salt, vinegar and spices such as Sichuan pepper, but no chili. The change shows up in the eighteenth century. The Jeungbo sallim gyeongje (증보산림경제), an expanded farm-and-household manual compiled by Yu Jung-im in 1766, includes numerous kimchi recipes using chili, whole or ground, among them ancestors of today's cucumber and radish kimchi.

One explanation for chili's rapid adoption is practical. Capsaicin helps slow the rancidity of the fats in salted seafood and is thought to favor the lactic acid fermentation that sours kimchi, which made chili a natural partner for the jeotgal-seasoned kimchi that was developing at the time. Chili also offered color and heat at a moment when other spices were expensive.

The birth of gochujang

Chili also created an entirely new member of the jang family. The earliest documented recipe for gochujang, in the same Jeungbo sallim gyeongje, combines fermented soybean powder, chili powder and glutinous rice flour, seasoned with good soy sauce. That early paste contained much less chili than modern versions; later household manuals such as the Gyuhap chongseo (1809) show more chili and a richer grain base. By the modern period regional versions made with barley, millet or sweet potato had appeared, and Sunchang in North Jeolla became especially famous for its gochujang.

A red cuisine

The napa cabbage kimchi that most people picture today, red with gochugaru and layered with salted shrimp, is the product of these two centuries of change, completed only when heading napa cabbage became widely grown in the early twentieth century. Older, chili-free styles survive in dongchimi, nabak kimchi and white kimchi, reminders of how Korean kimchi tasted before the chili arrived.