[Families that have grown weary of
eating commercial kimchi in big cities have started making pilgrimages to the
countryside where they can learn how to prepare it on their own.]
“We are all set until this time
next year!” said Ms. Ha, 40, looking contentedly at the neat stack of boxes. “Nothing makes a Korean
family feel secure like a good stock of kimchi does.”
In Korea, where people like to say
they “can’t
live without kimchi,” November is kimchi-making season, or “kimjang.” And
like the Ha family, many Koreans are trying to keep the centuries-old tradition
alive.
Kimjang was once a ritual as
timeless as the changing of the seasons. When the first frost came, families
would create stockpiles of kimchi, storing it in large clay pots often buried in the ground. These pots of kimchi
sustained them through the long winter and lean spring, when fresh vegetables
were unavailable.
Both South and North Korea are so proud of the autumn ritual that
they campaigned — separately, but successfully — to put kimjang on UNESCO’s
list of “intangible cultural heritage of humanity.”
But in the age of foolproof meal
kits and on-demand grocery delivery, the tradition is in decline.
“Whatever else they make well,
those big businesses can’t make kimchi as good as the one your mom or
mother-in-law made,” Ms. Ha said.
Ms. Ha used to get kimchi from her
mother, a common practice among many younger Koreans living in big cities. But
when her mother became too old to make the dish — a laborious, time-consuming
task — Ms. Ha and her husband tried to make it on their own, using recipes
found on YouTube.
More often than not, they failed.
Last year, weary of commercial
kimchi but unable to make their own from scratch, Ms. Ha’s family began
traveling to a rural town to learn.
Goesan, a
mountainous county in central South Korea, is famous for its scenic gorges,
Zelkova trees and three foods — corn, chili pepper and cabbage. Those last two
are among the most important ingredients for kimchi.
Han Sook-hee, 59, and other women
in White Horse village, in Goesan county, still make kimchi for themselves and
for their children, who have
migrated to cities. In recent years, the women started receiving requests for
kimchi from their children’s neighbors.
Four years ago, a villager made a
suggestion: Why not lead a kimjang workshop to give the village’s rapidly aging
population extra income during the agricultural off-season and to help those
who want to learn the art of making kimchi?
The festival was an instant hit.
“We provide the ingredients fixed
and ready, and all the participating families have to do is mix them into
kimchi,” Ms. Han said. “We also try to recreate the merrymaking atmosphere of
kimjang.”
In a custom similar to an Amish barn
raising, entire villages used to turn out during kimjang, helping one
family make its kimchi before moving on to the next. Hogs were slaughtered and
makgeolli — Korean rice wine — was consumed over songs and laughter.
During kimjang, families cleaned
hundreds of heads of cabbage and soaked them in large tubs of salty water for a
couple of days, turning them over twice a day. They slathered each cabbage leaf
with a sauce made of chili pepper, garlic, ginger, scallion, radish, fermented
fish and other ingredients. The cabbages were then stacked and patted down in
jars. Lactic fermentation gave the kimchi its unique taste and texture.
After the success of the White
Horse workshop, the Goesan government began hosting a three-day “kimjang
festival” last fall.
“The kimjang festival will serve as
a bridge between urban families who wish to make their own kimchi and our
farmers who want to sell cabbage and other kimchi ingredients,” said Goesan’s
mayor, Lee Cha-young.
The first festival attracted 80,000
people last year, he said. This year, because of the coronavirus, the county
held a socially-distanced version inside its stadium.
Shin Tae-sook, 71, joined the
festival last year because she said it made the work easier. This year, she
brought her daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter with her. Although she used
the sauce the county provided, she added her family touch — a bucket of raw
oysters.
“A Korean meal is not complete
without kimchi; it makes you feel embarrassed when you have a guest and you
don’t have kimchi on the table,” Ms. Shin said. “Kimchi is a dish, but you can
make other dishes out of it.”
She listed them off: “Kimchi soup,
kimchi stew, kimchi pancake, kimchi anything,” she said. “You can’t talk about
Korean food without talking about kimchi.”
Woo Kyong-ho, a workshop organizer,
said that when he traveled abroad and didn’t have kimchi for a few days, he
suffered “kimchi withdrawal symptoms.” The food is so closely associated with
Korean identity that when South Korea sent its first astronaut to the
International Space Station in 2008, kimchi
was taken along on the mission.
When Koreans take group photos,
they say, “Kimchiiii,” instead of “cheese.”
“Kimjang and kimchi brought a
Korean community together,” said Kim Jeong-hee, head of the Jinji Museum, which
specializes in Korean culinary history.
Korean families don’t consume as
much kimchi at home as their ancestors did. They eat out more often and have
plenty of alternatives to choose from. They also buy more factory-made kimchi,
38 percent of which is imported
from China.
In 2018, four out of every 10 South
Korean households said they had never made kimchi or knew how to, according to the World Institute
of Kimchi.
But kimchi remains the food Korean
families like to share. Recipes usually vary from village to village, and from
family to family, and are handed down through generations. A request for
seconds is considered high praise and a source of pride.
The autumn foliage was starting to
change colors in Goesan as the festival got underway this year. Roadside
placards read, “Come to Goesan and make kimchi!” Families arrived with plastic
boxes specially designed for kimchi fridges, a common appliance in many Korean
homes. They paid $134 for 44 pounds of cleaned and salted cabbage and 16.5
pounds of kimchi marinade.
Standing around a table, each
family began mixing, all wearing elbow-length pink rubber gloves, while village
meisters looked on and offered tips. Steamed pork and makgeolli were available
for free, though singing was banned for safety reasons related to the
coronavirus.
Ms. Han said each village in Goesan
had a secret ingredient or two. White Horse’s, she said proudly, was the
pumpkin and white forsythia extracts. Adding them, she said, makes its kimchi
“sweet, spicy and crisp.”
