A History of Banchan

Banchan (반찬) are the side dishes eaten with rice, and the idea behind them is old: a meal divided into a staple and the dishes that accompany it. Korean food writers have long described this split between jusik (the staple, usually rice) and busik (everything else) as the defining shape of the everyday meal. Tracing how that shape developed is harder than it sounds, because for most of Korean history the people who wrote things down rarely described what ordinary households ate at an ordinary table.

Early evidence: vessels and preserved seasonings

The earliest clues are archaeological. Earthenware steamers (siru) turn up in Three Kingdoms tombs, and a mural in the Goguryeo tomb at Anak shows a kitchen with food being steamed, which tells us grain was cooked at scale long before anyone recorded a menu. Iron cauldrons excavated from Silla tombs suggest the move from steaming grain to boiling it as bap, the cooked rice that banchan were designed to accompany.

Written evidence for side dishes begins with seasonings and preserves rather than recipes. The Samguk sagi records that in 683 King Sinmun of Silla sent soy sauce (jang) and fermented soybeans among the betrothal gifts for his queen, and the same list includes rice, wine, oil, honey, dried meat and salted fish. That list is the first documentary sign of jang and of jeotgal, the salted seafood that still seasons kimchi and banchan today. It shows that the building blocks of a seasoned side dish were already staple goods, but it does not tell us how they were served.

Goryeo: Buddhism and the vegetable table

Buddhism was the state religion of Goryeo (918–1392), and historians commonly credit its spread with encouraging restraint in meat-eating and a culture of tea, both of which favored grain sweets, rice cakes and vegetable cookery. The tradition of seasoning greens with soy sauce, sesame and perilla, refined in monastery kitchens and still visible in temple food, is often linked to this period. The link is plausible but largely inferred: it rests on the religious climate and on later practice, not on detailed Goryeo menus. Official records do show how basic jang had become, since the Goryeosa notes that in 1018 the state distributed salt and jang to people in need.

Joseon: the bansang takes form

Under the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), Confucian ritual and the household culture of the yangban, the scholar-official class, gave the meal its most formal structure. Ancestral rites, banquets and the daily table were organized with care, and household manuals written in this period, surveyed in Joseon cookbooks, describe namul, braises, pickles and preserved side dishes in detail. Long-keeping banchan such as jangajji, dried and salted fish and soy-braised dishes made sense in households that had to feed many people through long winters.

The graded table of 3, 5, 7, 9 and 12 cheop, explained in the Korean table, is the best-known product of this culture. Yet the clearest diagrams of these settings appear late: the cookbook Siuijeonseo, thought to date from the late nineteenth century, includes illustrated layouts for 5-, 7- and 9-cheop tables. The system probably formalized older habits rather than inventing them, but how far back the exact counts go is uncertain. The court table, described in royal court cuisine, sat at the top of the same logic.

Joseon also changed what went into banchan. Chili peppers arrived only in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and took generations to become a standard seasoning, so the red, spicy side dishes many people now picture are relatively recent; see chili peppers in Korea.

Into the twentieth century

Recipe writing kept pace with change. A household manuscript known as Banchan deungsok, attributed to a daughter-in-law of the Miryang Son family in Cheongju and copied out in 1913, records how yangban households prepared and handled side-dish ingredients, and the term mitbanchan (밑반찬), for staple side dishes made in quantity and stored, appears in print only from the early 1960s. Its familiar members, such as soy-braised beef, braised black soybeans and seasoned dried squid, reflect a modern, refrigerated kitchen as much as an old one.

What historians can and can't say

• What is well supported: fermented soybean sauces and salted seafood were basic foods by the seventh century; rice cooked as bap was the center of the elite meal; and by late Joseon a formal grammar of side dishes existed in yangban and court households.
• What is inferred: the role of Buddhism in shaping vegetable banchan, and the age of the cheop system, rest partly on reasoning backward from later practice.
• What is largely unknown: the everyday meals of farmers and the urban poor before the modern era. Most surviving recipes come from literate, prosperous households, and dish names shifted across regions and centuries, so even a recipe's name is not always a reliable guide to its history.

What does seem continuous is the principle: rice at the center, and a changing cast of small, seasoned dishes, from namul to kimchi to jeotgal, arranged so the rice tastes better.