Joseon Cookbooks and the Written Record of Korean Food

Much of what is known about how Koreans cooked before the twentieth century comes from a small shelf of manuscripts. Some are farm and household encyclopedias written by scholars in Classical Chinese; others are recipe collections written in hangul by women for their daughters and daughters-in-law. Read together, they show dishes appearing, changing names and disappearing, and they are the reason food historians can say anything precise about the Korean table of the 1600s or 1800s.

Before the classics

Korean food writing did not begin in the late Joseon period. The Sanga yorok, compiled by the court physician Jeon Sun-ui in the fifteenth century, is a farming manual in Classical Chinese that also records some 229 recipes, including dozens of wines, soy sauces and early pickles. A short hangul recipe collection now called Choessi eumsikbeop, attributed to a woman of the Haeju Choe family (1591–1660), survives from the early to mid seventeenth century. Claims about which book is the "first" Korean cookbook therefore depend on how a cookbook is defined.

Eumsik dimibang (c. 1670)

The best known of these texts is Eumsik dimibang (음식디미방), also catalogued under its Chinese-character title Gyugon siuibang. It was written around 1670 by Jang Gye-hyang (1598–1680), a scholar's wife of the Andong Jang clan and mother of the Confucian scholar Yi Hyeon-il, who wrote it, by her own account, so that her daughters could copy it and the household's methods would not be lost. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture counts 132 entries, 51 of them on brewing, which shows how central home brewing was to an elite household; other editions count the entries differently. Alongside noodles, rice cakes, dumplings, kimchi, steamed dishes and sweets, it describes preserving meat, fruit and vegetables, and an early mung-bean pancake that historians connect to today's nokdu-bindaetteok. It has long been called the oldest surviving Korean cookbook with detailed, practical recipes, though the earlier texts above complicate that title, and it remains a key source for the yangban cooking of North Gyeongsang, the region around Andong.

Sallim gyeongje and its expansion (1766)

Sallim gyeongje (산림경제), "Farm and Forest Economy," was compiled late in life by the scholar-official Hong Man-seon (1643–1715). It is not a cookbook in the modern sense but a manual for running a rural estate in sixteen sections, from choosing a house site and growing grain to beekeeping, first aid and famine relief. One section, chiseon, covers the storage, cooking and processing of food. The book circulated only in manuscript, and its author was later forgotten.

In 1766 the physician and agronomist Yu Jung-rim expanded it into the sixteen-volume Jeungbo sallim gyeongje (증보산림경제), growing the sections from sixteen to twenty-three and splitting the food material into two parts. Food historians cite it for early kimchi recipes that use chili and for the earliest documented recipe for gochujang, part of the story told in chili peppers in Korea. It also contains the first Korean instructions for growing corn. Together the two books fed into Seo Yu-gu's vast early-nineteenth-century encyclopedia, Imwon gyeongje ji.

Gyuhap chongseo (1809)

Gyuhap chongseo (규합총서), roughly "Women's Encyclopedia," was written by Bingheogak Yi (1759–1824), a scholar in her own right, whose preface is dated to the winter solstice of 1809. Its first part covers making jang, brewing, rice, rice cakes, confections and side dishes; later parts treat sewing and dyeing, farming and animal husbandry, child-rearing and remedies. What sets it apart is method: she named the books she drew on and added notes marked as her own tested additions. For decades it circulated anonymously in copies and woodblock editions until a 1939 discovery of her collected works confirmed her authorship. It became the most widely read of the old manuscript household books.

Siuijeonseo (late 19th century)

Siuijeonseo (시의전서) survives only as a copy made around 1919 by Sim Hwan-jin, a county magistrate in Sangju, from a manuscript held by a local yangban family; the original is thought to date from the late 1800s. It organizes recipes by type, from jang and kimchi to namul, braises and sweets, and shows traces of Gyeongsang dialect. Its most valuable pages for banchan history are illustrated layouts of 5-, 7- and 9-cheop tables, a primary source for the Korean table.

Joseon musang sinsik yori jebeop (1924)

By the colonial period, cookbooks had become printed books for a reading public. Joseon musang sinsik yori jebeop (조선무쌍신식요리제법), published in 1924 by Yi Yong-gi, roughly means "Unrivaled New Korean Cooking Methods." It drew heavily on the food chapters of Imwon gyeongje ji, translated into Korean and updated with newer techniques, and added short sections on Western, Chinese and Japanese cooking. Its color cover, showing a sinseollo hot pot and ingredients, is often called the first color illustration in a Korean cookbook. It sold well enough to be reprinted, with an expanded edition in 1936 and a fourth edition by 1943.

Reading the books with care

These texts describe the kitchens of literate, prosperous households, so they say more about yangban cooking than about what most people ate. Dates and authorship can also be uncertain, as the long anonymity of Gyuhap chongseo and the copied Siuijeonseo show. Even so, they are the closest thing Korean food has to an archive, and many modern descriptions of kimchi, jang and banchan ultimately trace back to them.