By Kyung-Shin Kang
Food has always been one of my great passions. I like the smell of it, the texture of it, and the way a home feels when there is something cooking in the kitchen. It is not so much the eating of the food that enraptures me, but the whole process of preparing for it and looking forward to what might come up. Many of the most memorable pieces of literature I read as a child always had some sort of feast scene in them—complete with a roast boar biting an apple. It is no wonder then that I have continued to profess an interest in looking into our food culture. One of my interesting observations of Koreans is that the majority of our appetites are based upon Western standards as these foods have come into our food arena. Most people in my elementary, middle-school and even high-school classes would answer that their favorite food is spaghetti or steak; nowadays some people even proudly announce a fancy French dish to show off their palettes while few of them mention the familiar kimchi jjigae. In fact, the majority of kids who respond with Korean dishes will say ddukboki, samgeupsal, jjajangmeun or kimbap. Technically speaking, these cannot really be defined as “Korean”, since the red-hot version of ddukboki only came out a few decades ago, samgeupsal was actually conceived during the Japanese occupation when all the mine workers had was a pot lid to cook on, and kimpab is quite obviously a celebrated Japanese dish. The irony here is that although most of its citizens do not seem to appreciate Korean food any more than they do Italian spaghetti, the country is going great lengths to promote Korean food internationally. The problem is, the old cuisine our ancestors have enjoyed is long lost and forgotten and food has come into the arena.
You may ask any 7 year-old you can find on the street or a random foreigner what the main characteristic of Korean food is. Nine times out of ten, they’ll answer that it’s the spiciness, accompanied by a vague comment like “๋งค์์” in broken Korean. We take this as a symbol of pride and go as far as to test foreigners on who can eat the hottest pepper, declaring the winner as the most-Korean-esque person. We describe ourselves of being a hot culture, impatient in its needs and constantly on a quest for spicier foods.
Hot food is good, and when you think about our old saying which declares that “food is only as good as the jang”, it becomes evident that individual flavoring is indeed an important part of the Korean cuisine. This is not to say, however, that Korean food is over-seasoned, or that everything you eat is supposed to be spicy, as most foreigners and even Koreans seem to believe. The fact is, our ancestors did not use spices very often because they thought it killed the original taste of all the other ingredients and instead preferred to use it in small quantities. Since gochujang only came into the Korean scene in the late sixteenth century, many of our recipes were created without the use of it. Like all ingredients that have been celebrated by our ancestors, spice and seasoning only work their magic if they are in harmony with the other ingredients used. In fact, many of our ancestors declared that food which preserved the ingredients’ original taste was the best kind of all and hence our food was always a bit mild and bland. Though it may come as a surprise to most, our food culture does not end at spiciness.
But as Korea went through a series of wars that left them quite destitute, people had to make do with the few ingredients at hand and took to covering everything edible (and sometimes non-edible ingredients) they could find with gochujang. Some say that chili sauce was created by traveling cowboys who needed a way to preserve food for a long time and tasted pretty much the same. Indeed, this is inherently true for the hot and spicy Korean dishes that can be found even today, as making something spicy is the surest way to ensure some degree of tastiness even while completely ignoring the more delicate details of cooking.
However, it is not necessary to look for such a faraway example as chili sauce. At Daewon, before the small revolution that happened a few weeks ago, the majority of our food was a mismatched combination of meat, squid, and other unknown ingredients along with a considerable amount of gochujang smothered all over. Seasoned squid tasted like seasoned chicken and seasoned chicken tasted like seasoned pork so there really isn’t much importance on what is being seasoned as much as the seasoning itself.
In the past, food was a considered as a bodily experience: therefore, there existed strict rules regarding the presentation of the meal as well as the preparation. Various dishes were presented in a certain order according to temperature, taste, texture, or color. Individual dishes, or ban-chan as we know them, were all intended to harmonize with each other as a whole experience, so there existed rules which guided where a meat dish should go, where a vegetable dish should sit and how a hot dish and a cool dish should be separated from each other.
On the other hand, when asked what they think a traditional meal looks like, modern people will imagine a whole family grouped around a table, sharing the same jjigae while haphazardly attacking the same bowl of kimchi, and altogether eating a pretty messy meal. Some people look towards this as a symbol of familial love and community life. In reality, however, Korean food was never meant to be eaten in large groups, unless it was a feast or festival of some sort. Rather, it was served in proportions for an individual on a single table. Each table setting would have rice, soup and an assortment of jangs along with typically 3 to 5 ban-chans. The colonial period was a crucial turning point in our eating habits and was the start of a completely different kind of culture, the one we are now familiar with. Because hunger was an ever-present evil, it brought about the notion that it is better to be full then to eat well. No one was particular enough to demand well-served dishes on a single table setting and opted with the more casual way of eating.
A country’s cuisine is its essence; it is a declaration, an exaltation of our people, our land and our culture. This can be attributed to a number of reasons: a country’s cuisine is the result of the unique geography and climate of the country as well as the tastes of the people and encompasses a wide range of cultural and traditional practices. Yet for a long time, we have started to define our culture and our people as spicy, messy and fusion. For some reason, we have come to delicately ignore the fact that our food should be harmonized and started to emphasize only one or two characteristics of our cuisine while flagrantly ignoring the rest. It is important for us to realize what our traditions are and be able to differentiate between them because believe it or not, we have a rich history of food and we should be proud of it.
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