Kimchi

Salt first, then everything else

Kimchi is a Korean side dish — banchan — of salted and fermented vegetables, most often napa cabbage or Korean radish. Over a hundred and eighty kinds are recognised.

The making starts with salt. The cut vegetables are coated in it, which draws the water out of them and raises their salt content, and that is what preserves them. Then comes the seasoning: gochugaru, the Korean chilli powder that gives kimchi its colour, with garlic, ginger, spring onions and jeotgal — salted, fermented seafood. In the south of the country the jeotgal is generous, and often myeolchi-jeot, salted anchovies.

After that the vegetables are left to themselves. Lactic acid bacteria go to work, producing lactic acid, hydrogen peroxide and carbon dioxide; the lactic acid drops the pH fast, and the sharply acidic result is a place almost nothing else can live in. The preservation is not the salt alone — it is the salt setting up conditions for one organism to crowd out the rest.

It was white for most of its life

Chilli peppers were unknown in Korea until the early seventeenth century, and even after they arrived it was not until the nineteenth that putting them in kimchi became general practice. For most of the history of this food, then, it was not red.

The jars are onggi, large earthenware fermentation vessels. Traditionally they were set into the ground, which kept the kimchi from freezing through the winter and held it at a steady temperature. Above ground they stand together on the jangdokdae, the raised terrace a Korean house keeps for its jars.

Kimjang

What UNESCO inscribed on its Representative List in 2013, at the Republic of Korea's request, is not kimchi. It is kimjang — the making and sharing of it.

Kimjang runs on the agricultural year. Through spring, summer and late summer the ingredients are got ready; then, in late autumn, whole communities make and share large quantities at once, so that every household has enough to get through a long and hard winter. Choosing the day is a judgement about the weather, and it has traditionally been the women of the house who make it.

The file is plain about what the practice is for. It calls kimjang an opportunity for strengthening family cooperation, notes that skills and ideas are shared and accumulated through the custom of exchanging kimchi between households, and says that the particular methods and ingredients a family uses are treated as an inheritance, passed from a mother-in-law to a newly married daughter-in-law. It is also, in the file's words, a reminder to many Koreans that human communities need to live in harmony with nature.