Potent Side Dish : Kimchi: The Spice of Life to Koreans

“Nobody can make it like my mother,” Kim Hong Yon boasted, his broad face warming in a smile on a nippy autumn afternoon.

Apple pie? Southern fried chicken? No, this is South Korea, and Kim was savoring the thought of his mother’s fermented cabbage, one of hundreds of concoctions of pickled vegetables that the Koreans call kimchi .

“From king to beggar, every Korean has always eaten kimchi, “ said Lee Hoon Sok, director of a Seoul museum dedicated to glorifying the humble dish. “Each has the same desire and cannot live without it.”

Potent Concoction

His assistant, Joo Young Ha, put in: “You watch. Even young Koreans who go into Western restaurants and order cutlets or a hamburger, they order kimchi on the side.”

Westerners usually recoil at the first whiff of a time-ripened kimchi --garlic and fermented fish are common ingredients. “It can get right rank, mate,” a resident Australian businessman said. But the aroma lures Koreans like kids to a cookie jar.

In Seoul’s suburban Karakdong district, mountains of big white Chinese cabbages and four-pound radishes were rising last week at the sprawling wholesale market of the government’s Agricultural Products Corp. Kim Hong Yon, sales chief of the corporation’s central cooperative and the son, he says, of the best kimchi- maker in Korea, had his mind on business.

It was the advent of kimjang , the season when mothers, sisters, wives and restaurateurs prepare the winter’s kimchi. In the last weeks of November and the first of December, in households across the country, the slicing, dicing and spicing will begin.

4,000 Tons of Cabbage

In the week beginning Nov. 25, Kim predicted, more than 2,500 tons of radish and 4,000 tons of cabbage will move through his cooperative each day, and it handles just 8% of Seoul’s total.

By mid-December, it all will have been cleaned, cut and stored in brown ceramic pots for the cold months ahead. There will be the unusual kimchis: dropwort and spinach, pomegranate and pumpkin; the fish- and meat-based kimchis: pollack and anchovy (a favorite in North Korea), pheasant and chicken; the water kimchis, delicate soups made with ginseng root, radish or cucumber.

None are cooked except the soft-radish kimchi, prepared especially for the elderly with poor teeth.

The king of the kimchis, according to museum official Joo, is kamdongjoh , a mixture of octopus, roe, abalone and cabbage, plus various spices. “Only two people alive can make it,” Joo said. “They are old women, in their 70s, who came from wealthy families and live here in Seoul.”

Although the appeal of kimchi has not declined, the art of preparing it is waning in modern Korea. Joo, who estimates conservatively that there are 200 varieties of kimchi, says that only about 10 are common to every household.

“Thirty or 40 years ago, prospective brides were expected to be able to prepare 36 kimchis, “ he said, “and if they couldn’t, they had to take lessons from the older women.”

Thirty years ago, South Korea was just emerging from the war against the Communist North. The largely agricultural Korean Peninsula and its cities were in ruins. But life continued in the villages, and kimjang came at the end of each November.

Traditions Overwhelmed

In the last 20 years, however, an economic boom has brought enormous change to the cities, and Seoul, on the surface, now looks like any overgrown international capital. The traditions of kimchi are being overwhelmed.

At the big Midopa department store here, cabbage kimchi is sold in refrigerated vacuum bags. Other stores carry canned kimchi. Neither, said a salesgirl at Midopa, tastes like Mom’s.

Furthermore, eating habits are changing. The fast pace and long hours of city life leave little time for food preparation. Like young office workers in the United States, Koreans just grab a quick bowl of instant noodles on their way out the door.

“I like kimchi, particularly with noodles,” said a guest relations officer at Seoul’s Chosun Hotel. “But I think it’s mainly for the older generation.”

And agricultural advances have lessened the importance of kimjang. The hilly Korean countryside glistens with plastic greenhouses that make possible year-round production of vegetables and daily preparation of kimchi . The fall cabbage harvest is no longer the one-and-only chance to prepare food for the winter, no longer a time when schools are shut down so that children can help with the kimjang.

Chinese Origins

Every culture has developed some method of preserving foods, usually using pickling brine or vinegar. When the process came to Korea is not known, but preservation was mentioned in Chinese literature more than 3,000 years ago, and the Korean word kimchi is apparently derived from the Chinese phrase for “preservation of vegetables.”

Any descriptions of early Korean food practices, Joo noted, were lost in a cultural oddity. Only the privileged yangban class of scholar-officials could write, and they were forbidden to make observations on such low matters as food, money or exercise.

But by later accounts, in the 18th Century the Korean people began to raise kimchi above the simple combination of vegetables, fish and salt. In part because the smell of fermented fish was too much even for the locals, Joo said, Koreans began to add garlic and red pepper to the mix. The result was the uniquely Korean dish.

Although each region has its specialty, and even each family within a village, two kimchis are common to all households:

-- Whole cabbage kimchi. The cabbage is washed, dried and salted overnight. The next day, each leaf is parted and a mixture of sliced vegetables, herbs and spices, fermented fish sauce and fresh oysters slipped in, making a kimchi roll. When ready, the cabbage is sliced sideways and served. The flavor is a broad blend of the ingredients and, when properly made, the vegetables are crisp.

-- Hard radish kimchi. The radish is cut in one-inch cubes, mixed with sliced cabbage and a few other vegetables. The cubes are crunchy, and the predominant taste is of the spicy red pepper.

Considered Side Dishes

None of the popular kimchis have the throat-searing quality of some Chinese and Southeast Asian cuisines. All are considered side dishes to the thrice-daily portion of rice, and the meal is set out in a collection of small bowls holding kimchis, fermented fish, soup and other condiments.

Before the modernization of Korea, kimchis were critical to life in the countryside. Once the bitter Korean winter set in, the fields would produce no crops until late spring. The product of the kimjang season was placed in huge ceramic or wooden pots buried below ground, for warmth, up to their necks. Straw cones were placed over the necks themselves to shield off the frigid air.

When the household ran short, the top was removed and more kimchi ladled out for the family. Properly prepared, it would last for up to six months. The vegetables would remain crisp and provide vitamin C and other nutrients to the farm family during the bleak winter. As each week passed, however, the mixture would become more acidic, and the kimchi pulled from the pot in spring could provide only sour satisfaction.

“Ten days is best,” Joo said. “Any less and the spices have not penetrated the vegetables; much more and the sourness sets in.”

Joo and other proponents claim, or at least relate claims of, a number of beneficial properties for the humble pickled cabbage:

-- Its acidity makes it an indispensable side dish for fatty meats, improving the digestion. “We didn’t have a big tea culture like the Chinese and Japanese, nor for that matter a coffee culture like the Americans,” Joo said, explaining that kimchi serves the same digestive purpose here that tea and coffee do abroad.

-- A mysterious energizing quality is said to improve the performance of athletes. Some advocates say kimchi produces a caffeine effect. Joo has heard the stories, and he says that analyses of kimchis show no evidence of caffeine but that urinalyses of kimchi- eating athletes show traces of the stimulant.

-- As with all Asian delicacies, some people make the case that kimchi has an aphrodisiac quality. Joo is not sure, but he notes the existence of “temple” kimchi, which is prepared for Buddhist monks. It is devoid of any spice or other ingredient said to have arousing powers.

Popular in Restaurants

In Seoul restaurants, most kimchi is prepared once or twice a week, but it is nonetheless appreciated. Just inside the front door of Hyundai Kalkusu, an unpretentious cafe of 20 tables on a narrow, downtown street, three waitress/cooks squatted the other day beside large bowls of cabbage, deftly slicing it with butcher knives. That night it would be salted, and the next day it would be mixed with the “house secret” ingredients.

It was mid-afternoon, and three or four men sat alone at tables, reading their newspapers and eating noodles and kimchi.

One of the women, Park Eun Ja, 45, paused in her labor and puzzled over a reporter’s questions about something so basic. At home, she said, she makes a pot of kimchi once a week, enough for her and her family until the next week. At the restaurant, it is prepared every two or three days. “Too hard to do it every day,” she said.

Prosaic as it is, Park takes pride in the product. “Young girls come in here all the time and ask us, ‘How do you make kimchi like this?’ ” she said.

A customer, Kim Hui Haeng, an engineer, said he makes a special cross-town trip to eat at Hyundai Kalkusu. “This is the best in the area,” he said. “Better than my mother’s.”

High praise, indeed, for a fermented cabbage.