Jongga Cuisine: Food of the Head Families

A jongga (종가) is the head house of a patrilineal lineage, the home of the eldest son of the eldest line, where the family's ancestral tablets are kept and its rites are held. The head of the house is the jongson and his wife the jongbu, and it was usually the jongbu who carried the kitchen. Jongga eumsik (종가 음식), head-family food, is the cooking passed down inside these households, often over many generations, and it is one of the most closely studied branches of Korean home cooking.

Serving ancestors, receiving guests

Jongga food culture is usually summed up in a Confucian phrase, bongjesa jeopbingaek (봉제사접빈객): to serve the ancestors in rites and to receive guests. Head houses gained their central role from the middle of the Joseon period, as Confucian ritual took root in local society and the head line became the place where rites were performed, social standing was inherited and the wider kin group was held together. Among them, the houses that hold a bulcheonwi rite, a perpetual rite for an ancestor honored so highly that his tablet is never retired, are regarded as the most recognized jongga.

The Digital Haenam Culture Encyclopedia gives a sense of the scale. At the Eochoeun head house of the Haenam Yun lineage in South Jeolla, a single rite in the 1970s still used about a sack of rice for rice cakes alone, stacked on the offering stand to roughly 91 centimeters. Because Haenam lies near the sea, the offerings centered on fish and seafood such as dried squid, pomfret, croaker, octopus and sea bream, and soups and namul were seasoned with clams or oysters. Elaborate garnishes, distinctive yakgwa, steamed rice cake, aspic and meat and fish dumplings on the offering table are thought to show the influence of food sent from the royal court. For how ordinary households lay out these tables, see jesa food.

Food for guests

Hospitality had its own repertoire. A head house was expected never to send a visitor away unfed, and many houses became known for one or two signature dishes for guests. The same Haenam entry describes persimmon dumplings rolled in bean powder, sweets made from the fruit of the nutmeg-yew trees around the house, and puffed rice confections coated with a seaweed called gamtae, all in the tradition of hangwa. Another Haenam head house served a large pot of chicken simmered with octopus and abalone to kin who came for its rites, and a third, with an old yuja tree in its courtyard, offered yuja preserve to guests with tea.

Jang and kimchi

Nothing in a jongga kitchen is guarded more carefully than jang. Many head houses keep a ssi-ganjang (씨간장), seed soy sauce: an old base of ganjang that is never allowed to run out and is topped up each year with new soy sauce, so the flavor of earlier generations carries forward. The Haenam encyclopedia notes one jongbu, recognized as a master of traditional soybean pastes, who keeps seed soy sauce more than a century old. The making of meju, doenjang and soy sauce is described in making jang. Kimchi was likewise a house matter, with individual head families known for recipes of their own. Specific house recipes vary widely, and few were written down before recent decades.

Documenting jongga food

Since 2010, South Korea's Rural Development Administration (RDA) has run a program to locate head-family dishes region by region and reconstruct their recipes. By 2016 it reported having identified about 2,200 inherited dishes from 140 families and reproducing the recipes of 184 of them, publishing books from 2014 onward, among them a collection of 100 selected jongga dishes. A 2013–2015 study by the RDA's National Institute of Agricultural Sciences recorded 333 dishes from eight families, including the Eunjin Song family of Daejeon, the Papyeong Yun family of Nonsan, the Pungsan Ryu family and the Haenam Yun family, and tested recipes for 64 of them. Comparing these with regional foods and old cookbooks, the researchers concluded that jongga cooking typically mixes influences from Seoul and Gyeonggi with local traditions and techniques particular to each family.

Some dishes have become well known beyond their houses. In Andong, long associated with head houses, the Uiseong Kim house of the scholar Kim Seong-il has been presented with Andong-style sikhye and yukjeon, and the Bonghwa house of Gwon Beol with pan-fried shark (sangeo jjijim), yakgwa and maejakgwa pastries.

Changing traditions

Jongga cooking is under pressure. Fewer relatives attend rites, so the number and quantity of offerings have fallen; rite liquor that was once brewed at home is now often bought; and many families now host guests at restaurants rather than in the house. The documentation projects of recent years are, in part, an attempt to record these kitchens while the people who learned them by hand can still demonstrate them. Related customs at court and in ordinary homes are covered in royal court cuisine and life ritual foods.