The History of Kimchi — The Food That Wasn’t Always Red.

Korea, 1614. A scholar named Yi Su-gwang is finishing the first encyclopedia his country has ever produced. Twenty volumes. Thousands of entries. Stars. Rivers. Medicina. Plants. And in the section on plants, he stops to describe something new. A small red fruit that farmers have started growing. He gives it a name that tells you exactly how he feels about it. Namanjo. The pepper of the southern barbarians. Then he writes this. It is highly toxic. It came here from Japan. People are planting it everywhere now. Taverns have discovered how fierce it is. And they mix it into liquor and sell it. Many who drink it die. That is the first clear mention of a chili pepper anyone has found in the written record of Korea. As a poison. Something that kills people in bars. Now, open your refrigerator. If there is a jar of kimchi in there, it is red. Nearly every jar on nearly every shelf in every ordinary supermarket in America is red. And it is red because of that fruit. The plant Yi Su-gwang warned his countrymen about is now the color of the most famous food his country has ever made. So the question is simple. How does a thing a scholar writes down as a poison end up defining a dish? And what did kimchi even look like for the centuries before that happened? Because it existed. It just was not red. Go back 400 years before the encyclopedia. To the 1200s. Korea is the kingdom of Goryeo. And a poet named Lee Gyu-bo is writing about his garden. He is not writing about anything grand. He writes about six vegetables. Melon, eggplant, turnips, green onions, gourds, and radishes. And when he gets to the radishes, he mentions how his household keeps them. In summer, they soak them in soybean paste. For winter, they pack them in salt. He notes that the salted ones carry the family through the cold months. That is it. A few lines about radishes. And they are the oldest surviving lines that historians tie directly to kimchi. Picture what he is describing. A clay jar. White radish inside it. Clear brine covering the radish. No colour. No heat. No cabbage. Serve it to someone today and tell them it is kimchi. And they would think you were joking. But that jar solved the problem that shaped everything about life on the Korean peninsula. Winter there is long and hard. Fresh vegetables vanish for four months. Sometimes five. Rice fills the stomach. But a person cannot live on rice alone through a winter. And every family knew it. Whatever came out of the garden in autumn had to last until spring. And there were exactly two tools for making that happen. Salt. And the ground itself. The salt did the chemistry. Pack vegetables in enough of it and the salt pulls the water out of them. The bacteria that cause rot cannot survive in that brine. But a different kind can. The kind that turns sugars into acid. Over a few weeks the vegetable sours. And sour vegetables keep. The ground did the engineering. For generations. Korean families set their jars into pits behind the kitchen. Buried up to the neck. Where the earth stays cool in autumn and stops short of freezing in winter. Which is exactly the range where that slow souring works best. Koreans had a refrigerator centuries before anyone had electricity. It was a hole in the yard with a pot in it. And they filled that pot with everything. Radishes and cucumbers and eggplant and mustard leaves and green onions and wild greens pulled off the hillsides. Some they kept swimming in brine. Some they drained and packed dry. Some they seasoned with ginger. Some with garlic. Some with nothing at all. Old household records from Goryeo and early Joseon list dozens of these preparations. And what they share is a category. Not a recipe. The word for them sat closer to a verb than a noun. You did not make kimchi. You kimchi'd your vegetables. Which means the question people ask today. What is the original kimchi recipe? Has no answer. There was never one. There was a jar. And salt. And whatever the garden had produced that year. The strange part is that the white jar never went away. Walk into a Korean grocery store in Los Angeles or northern New Jersey and there it is in the cold case. Labeled bake kimchi. White kimchi. Pale cabbage and radish in a clear brine. Most Americans walk right past it looking for the red stuff. And never realize they just passed the older version. By the year 1600, families had been filling those jars for at least four centuries. Season after season. Generation after generation. Not one of them had ever been red. Then a ship tied up in a harbor in southern Japan. And the cargo on board was going to change the color of a country's food. It would just take 200 years to do it. Japanese records say a Portuguese missionary handed peppers to a feudal lord on the island of Kyushu sometime in the 1500s. And that is the stepping stone that matters. Because Japan is one short sea crossing from the southern tip of Korea. How exactly the pepper made that crossing is still argued about. What nobody disputes is the timing. By the early 1600s, the pepper was in the ground in Korea. And at that time, nobody wanted it. Remember the encyclopedia. Highly toxic. Many who drink it die. That was the reputation the pepper carried for most of a century. The agricultural manuals that taught Koreans how to farm did not bother explaining how to it until around 1715. A full century after Yi Su-gwang's warning. And it is not until 1766, in an expanded farming encyclopedia called the Jongbo Salim Gyeongje, that a cookbook finally spells it out in plain instructions. Salted radish. Salted cucumber. Ground red pepper. Into the jar. 1766. The pepper had been sitting in Korea for 150 years. And most kimchi was still white. So what changed? Why did a country that had happily eaten white salted radish for 600 years start dying it red? The answer was not taste. The answer was money. And fish. Start with the money. Salt was the entire foundation of winter food in Korea. And salt was not cheap. It had to be boiled out of seawater on the coast and hauled inland on the backs of men and animals. And the Joseon government knew how valuable it was. Because it taxed it and at times controlled who could make it. A family putting up enough vegetables to survive the winter needed a lot of salt. And every pound cost real money. The pepper offered a way out. Korean accounts from the period credit it with helping vegetables keep while using less salt. And modern food scientists have since found that the compound behind the burn, capsaicin, does slow the bacteria that spoil food. Households that mixed ground pepper into their jars found they could cut back on the salt and the vegetables still held. Less salt. Same result. For a poor farming family facing a hard winter, that was not a flavor decision. That was arithmetic. Now the fish. By the 1700s Koreans had been adding salted seafood to their vegetable jars for generations. Fermented shrimp. Fermented anchovy. Salted fish guts. The Koreans call it jeotgal. And it did two jobs at once. It was a source of salt that was often cheaper than the pure stuff. And it added a deep savory flavor that plain brine could never give. The problem was the smell. Fermented fish is a powerful thing. And a jar of vegetables packed with it could be hard to get near. According to Korea's own ministry of agriculture. The most likely reason people started spooning red pepper into those jars was to cover that fishiness. The pepper was a deodorant. Think about what that means for the color. Nobody sat down and decided kimchi should be red. The pepper got into the jar because it was cheaper than salt and because it masked the fish. The color came along for the ride. The single most recognizable feature of Korean food. The thing that lets a person across a restaurant know what is on your plate. Was a side effect. And once it was in. It spread the way cheap, useful things always spread. Through the 1700s and into the 1800s. Household cookbooks written by Joseon. Women record more and more preparations built on the same three ingredients. Salted vegetables. Fermented seafood. Ground red pepper. A cookbook from 1809. Written by a noblewoman named Yi Binghaeguk. Reads in places like something you could follow tonight. Garlic. Ginger. Green onion. Salted shrimp. Pepper. The jar had turned red. And it was not turning back. So by the year 1800. The pepper had won. Kimchi looked like kimchi. At least in color. But set a jar from 1800 next to the one in your refrigerator. And you would still notice that something is off. Look past the red. Look at the vegetable underneath it. It is radish. It is mustard greens. It is loose leaves and whole roots. The tall. Heavy. Tightly wrapped cabbage you were expecting is barely there. The cabbage in your kimchi has a name. Koreans call it Baechu. In America it gets sold as Napa cabbage. A tall. Tall. Tightly wrapped head with crinkled leaves. And most people assume it is as Korean as the pepper is Korean. Which is to say. It came from somewhere else. It came from China. The plant was bred near Beijing. And for most of its history it stayed there. Loose-leafed cabbages had been grown in Korea for centuries. The kind that fan open like lettuce. But the dense. Heavy. Heading cabbage that makes modern kimchi was a different animal. It was finicky about soil. It was finicky about temperature. It bolted in heat and rotted in wet. Korean farmers who tried it through the 1700s and 1800s mostly got poor results. And the old cookbooks reflect that. Recipes from the 1800s that use cabbage tend to pair it with radish. As if they did not quite trust it to carry a jar on its own. And about that American name. Napa has nothing to do with the valley in California. It comes from a Japanese word for leafy greens. The vegetable got its English name from Japanese farmers on the west coast. And the name stuck before most Americans had ever tasted the thing. The cabbage you would recognize today only took hold in Korean fields in the early 1900s. And as it did. Something flipped. The vegetables that had been the main event for a thousand years. The radish. The cucumber. The green onion. Got demoted. They became the stuffing. Shredded. Mixed with pepper and garlic and salted shrimp. And tucked between the leaves of the cabbage. The star of the old jar was now the filling of the new one. Then Japan annexed Korea. And the cabbage story turns into something else entirely. For 35 years. From 1910 to 1945. Korea was a Japanese colony. And the colonial government ran agriculture. The way colonial governments run everything. Korean farmers grew the vegetables. Japanese companies produced the seed. So when the colony ended. Korea woke up as a country that ate cabbage kimchi at nearly every meal. And had almost no one who knew how to produce cabbage seed. The national dish had a vegetable at the center of it. And the nation had to buy the seed for that vegetable from the country it had just thrown out. Japanese seed companies knew it. And they charged accordingly. The man who changed that was a Japanese citizen named Tsunaga Nagaharu. And his real name was Woo Jang Chon. He was born in Tokyo in 1898 to a Korean father and a Japanese mother. By the 1930s. He was one of the most respected plant breeders in the world. He had published work on how cabbage species relate to one another that geneticists still cite. When the colony ended. The new South Korean government went looking for him. Syngman Rhee. The first president. Backed a public campaign to bring him home. And a team in Busan raised money to build him a research institute before he had even agreed to come. He agreed. He gathered up the papers that traced his father's family back to Korea. Walked into a Japanese immigration office. And turned himself in as a Korean. They deported him. He arrived in Busan in March of 1950. Three months later. North Korea invaded. Through the war and the years after it. He bred cabbage that would head up properly in Korean soil. Radish that would not bolt. Peppers. Onions. Tomatoes. Seed potatoes that resisted disease. Nobody calls him the father of kimchi. And he would not have wanted the title. He bred plants. But the dish the world now recognizes. Red pepper on napa cabbage. Would have been a far harder thing to make by the million without him. By the 1950s. Every ingredient was on the table. Salt. Pepper. Fermented seafood. A cabbage that could grow at home. But the thing that turned those ingredients into kimchi was never a recipe. It is the last week of November in a farming village south of Seoul. The first hard frost came three nights ago. That is the signal. Cabbage picked before the frost is sweet and crisp. Cabbage left past, it freezes in the field. And a frozen cabbage makes mush. So the whole village is working the same week. Yesterday the family split 200 heads of cabbage down the middle and salted them. Not lightly. Handfuls of coarse sea salt worked between every leaf. Then the halves stacked in tubs and left overnight. This morning the cabbage has gone limp and bends without breaking. Rinse it three times and it is ready. The neighbors arrive around eight. A sister-in-law. Two women from the next house over. A teenage grandson pressed into carrying. They settle onto low stools in the courtyard around a plastic tub the size of a kiddie pool. And they pull on rubber gloves. The long pink ones that so many Korean kitchens own for exactly this purpose. Everything they need has been waiting for months. The red pepper was picked in September. Dried on the rooftop until it crackled. And ground into flakes the color of brick. The salted shrimp came from the coast in a sealed jar and has been aging since spring. Garlic. Jinger. Green onions. And a mound of radish shredded into threads. The same radish that carried kimchi for a thousand years and now plays a supporting role. All of it goes into the tub with the pepper and a ladle of rice porridge to help the paste cling. And the grandmother mixes it with both arms up to the elbow. Then the real work. Pick up half a cabbage. Lift each leaf. Push the red paste into the gap with your fingers. Leaf by leaf. From the outside in. Until the whole thing is stuffed and slick. Fold the outer leaf around to hold it shut. Set it in the jar. Pick up the next one. Two hundred cabbages. Four hundred halves. And every leaf touched by a hand. There is no scale on the table. At some point, the grandmother tears off a strip of stuffed leaf. Eats it. And says it needs more salt. And somebody adds salt. Her daughter will do the same thing in 30 years and get a slightly different answer. And her daughter after that. This is why every family's kimchi tastes different. Why the north of the country makes it milder and wetter and the south makes it saltier and hotter. Why two jars from two houses on the same street are not the same food. The recipe in this courtyard was never written down. Because it was never really a recipe. It lives in a hand that knows how much is enough. By mid-afternoon the jars are full. Brown clay ongi. The same shape Yi Gyubo would have known. And they go into a pit behind the kitchen before the ground freezes hard. The neighbors leave with containers of fresh kimchi for their own tables. And next week this family will walk over to the next house and do it all again for them. Nobody keeps count. It evens out. That is Kimjang. The word means the making of kimchi for winter. And for most of Korean history it was the most important week of the rural year after the harvest itself. A family of five would put up anywhere from 50 to 200 heads of cabbage. Enough to last from December to April. Miss the week. And you did not have The old version of this is fading. Most Koreans live in apartments now. And there is no yard to bury a jar in. But the habit refused to die. It just changed shape. Korean appliance makers had been tinkering with kimchi refrigerators since the mid-1980s. And in 1995, one of them, a boxy unit called Dimchae that held kimchi at the exact temperature of a buried clay pot, turned a niche gadget into something every Korean home wanted. Today it is about as common there as a washing machine. Families still gather in November. The tub sits on an apartment balcony instead of a courtyard. In 2013, UNESCO added Kimjang to its list of the world's intangible cultural heritage, which made official something every Korean already knew. So this is kimchi as Koreans know it. 200 kinds. A different version in every house. No measurements anywhere. Just hands that remember. Which raises a question that should bother you a little. If the food is that varied, if it has never been one thing in its own country, why does an American hear the word and see exactly one picture, red paste on napa cabbage, in a jar? With a label, somebody started narrowing it down. And one of the places it happened was the White House. In March of 1967, March 14th, 1967, the Prime Minister of South Korea, Chung-il Kwon, is sitting in the White House across from Lyndon Johnson. And he has a letter in his hand from his president. Park Chung-hae. South Korea had been fighting in Vietnam for two years at that point. Johnson had asked his allies for troops. And Park had delivered more than anyone. The second largest foreign force in the country after the Americans. The letter covered the things you would expect. Equipment, modernization of the Korean army, money. And then it got to the real problem. The Korean troops did not have kimchi. They were eating American rations. Canned meat, crackers, powdered everything. And the Koreans were miserable. Morale, the letter said, was suffering for it. Ten days later, Johnson wrote back. He said he fully understood the desire of Park's men to eat familiar rations. Because that was how it had always been with soldiers throughout history. And he had instructed Secretary McNamara to work out the details with the Koreans. That sounds like the end of it. It was not. Because nobody had ever tried to make kimchi at that scale. Kimchi is alive. That is the whole point of it. The bacteria that sour it keep working as long as the jar sits there. Which is why a jar from November tastes different in January and different again in March. You cannot seal a living thing in a tin. Ship it across the South China Sea. And leave it in a jungle depot for six months. It will blow the lid off. American food scientists and Korean canning plants spent most of 1967 fighting that problem. And the clock ran while they did. Canned kimchi reached Vietnam in 1968. Korean soldiers ate it out of tins in the Central Highlands. And what almost nobody noticed at the time is what that program did to the food itself. To can kimchi for an army. You cannot have 200 kinds. You cannot have a grandmother tearing off a leaf and calling for more salt. You need one vegetable. One recipe. One process. Repeated in a factory. The same in every can. Out of all the versions Korea had ever made, the planners picked the one that was cheapest to grow and easiest to pack. Napa cabbage. Red pepper. Garlic. Salted fish. Historians who study kimchi point to the Vietnam program as the first time the dish was industrialized. After the war, the same factories kept running. And packaged kimchi followed Korean construction crews to Saudi Arabia and Iraq in the 1970s. The can was not the only force at work. Supermarkets. Exports. And city apartments were all pulling in the same direction. But it was the first time anyone had to answer the question. What is kimchi? With a single recipe. And the answer they gave stuck. There was still one thing standing between that answer and the rest of the world. Koreans were embarrassed by it. This is hard to picture now. But through the 1950s and 60s, kimchi was something Koreans kept away from foreigners. Visitors complained about the smell. Koreans who could not imagine a meal without it. Quietly agreed that the smell was a problem and did not push the food on anyone. One Korean scholar describing that era wrote that kimchi was an embarrassment in any setting with outsiders. The thing everyone ate and nobody served to guests. Then Seoul won the 1988 Olympics. And the country had to decide what to put on the table. The organizers put kimchi on the official menu of the Olympic Village. That was a real decision. And they made it nervously. The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that officials were so worried about foreign reaction that anyone working face-to-face with visitors was instructed to brush their teeth thoroughly after every meal. A UPI reporter filed a story from the games that opened by announcing that Seoul was a magnificent, spotless city and that it reeked of garlic. From the moment you stepped off the plane. And then the thing the organizers feared did not happen. Athletes in the village ate it. Reporters who came for the sports wrote about the food instead. The games were the first in 12 years without a major boycott. So, the people eating kimchi in that cafeteria came from the Soviet Union and East Germany and China as well as from America and Western Europe. Kimchi exports climbed in the years after. In 2001, an international food standards body, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, published an official definition of kimchi. And the definition it wrote down looked a lot like the factory version. Napa cabbage, red pepper, fermented seafood. The can had become the law. That is the kimchi that reached the Korean grocery stores of Los Angeles and Flushing and Annandale. And then the ordinary supermarkets next to them. That is the jar in your refrigerator. The smell the organizers tried to brush away is now a selling point on packaging in Ohio. The pepper that helped turn kimchi red had crossed oceans before it ever reached Korea. Centuries later, red kimchi crossed them again, ending up in American refrigerators. Everything you recognize about kimchi was added later. The red. The heat. The cabbage. The single picture the whole world shares when it hears the name. All of it has a date. And most of it has a name attached. The only part that never changed is the oldest part. A jar in the ground. And the winter, it was built to beat. So here is what I want to know. Where did you kimchi for the first time? And who put it in front of you? Tell me in the comments. Because somebody had to hand it to you. And I'm really curious to hear what you think of this special dish.