The program "Culinary Class Wars" recently aired to great popularity on Netflix. But watching this show, one comes to the mistaken impression that all food must henceforth aspire to become fine cuisine. One is also led to the mistaken belief that fine cuisine must first possess beautiful colors, shapes, and aromas, in both appearance and scent.
Because of this misconception, gourmets sometimes select Parisian cuisine, which originated from royal cuisine, as a representative fine cuisine, setting aside the question of how delicious and healthy the food actually is. It seems as though how prettily food is served has become the criterion for judging fine cuisine. It is regrettable that in Korea too, this Western perspective seems to be becoming the standard for judging the value of food. I wish to oppose the movement to use this standard as a yardstick for judging the value of our Korean cuisine. I think "Culinary Class Wars" is, representatively, one example of such a movement.
I have no desire to dispute that French cuisine remains a fine cuisine recognized by gourmets worldwide. In fact, the world-famous French cuisine originates from French royal cuisine. In the 18th century, when the Bourbon dynasty collapsed in the French Revolution, royal chefs were suddenly dismissed en masse and lost their places. Having no choice but to leave the palace, these chefs opened restaurants and made and sold dishes centered on the royal cuisine they had once served to kings—this is the origin of modern French cuisine. These royal chefs were people who had cooked in the palace with a focus on how to make the king enjoy his food, and so they sold the king's food for ordinary people to eat. Thus, the royal cuisine eaten by kings came to be eaten by ordinary people and established itself as French cuisine. Of course, apart from royal cuisine, each region of France had its own local food, and French royal cuisine too does not have its roots solely in France.
These days in Korea too, more and more people are studying our royal cuisine. They are approaching it with a sense of nobility, as if Korean royal cuisine had the same structure as French royal cuisine. But French royal cuisine and Korean royal cuisine differ in the purpose and roots of their birth. Generally, royal cuisine should refer to what a living king eats, but in Korea, it is more accurate to say that royal cuisine refers to food made in the palace. That is, in Korea it is more accurate to say that royal cuisine was food made for the spirits or souls of deceased kings, rather than food for a living king. Looking at the "balgi" records that documented the food eaten by kings during the Joseon Dynasty, the food eaten by the king was clearly different from food for rituals, royal processions, or ancestral rites.
So where then do the roots of Korean royal cuisine lie? Among our ancestors, the work of making food to feed children and keep them from hunger was generally outside the domain of men. Rather, men regarded cooking as work done by country women, and this created an atmosphere of disparaging our food. It was much like the climate of the time when Confucian scholars and learned men looked down on Hangeul, our own writing, calling it eonmun or the writing of the uneducated, and treated only those who could write Chinese characters as true yangban. At the time, even though our traditional food was food the king enjoyed and liked, people believed that he should be fed elegant and novel food, and that there should be separate food for rituals and ancestral rites. And so they searched for such food, but there was no suitable book.
So scholars (men) of the Joseon Dynasty, who had never even cooked, began studying Chinese cookbooks and started publishing books based on them. Hong Man-seon's "Sallim Gyeongje" (Farm Management) is a representative cookbook that appeared at the time. This book was produced based on China's "Qimin Yaoshu" and "Jujia Biyong," and is the first cookbook written by a Korean. Of course, it was a book written in Chinese characters, not in our Hangeul. Later, Yu Jung-rim reinforced this "Sallim Gyeongje" by inserting several of our foods into it and published the "Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje" (Revised and Augmented Farm Management). This is why records of our foods such as doenjang and cheonggukjang first appear in the "Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje." At the same time, these records in the "Jeungbo Sallim Gyeongje" provide the pretext that leads many people today to commit the error of claiming that most of our food was born around the 18th century. However, it is true that traditional food, which is centered on fermented food, has problems with smell and safety when transported over long distances. In this respect, our food was somewhat unsuitable as royal food used in rituals or processions traveling long distances, or as head-family food used in ancestral rites and memorial services at seowon (Confucian academies), and it was by no means a coincidence that food of Chinese origin, cooked with oil, came to occupy the place of royal food.
It is not desirable to classify the Korean traditional food that our mothers developed over thousands of years as commoner food or peasant food, ranking it below royal cuisine or head-family cuisine. The criterion for fine cuisine should be that living people can eat it safely, with dignity, and deliciously. Our royal food cannot become our royal cuisine for the single reason that it was made in our palace, nor can it become our fine cuisine.
There is no reason why our traditional food must necessarily develop into fine cuisine. I hope that elegant shapes and colors will not be the primary criteria for choice. It would be even better if healthy food were one criterion for choice. Preserving the value and story of tradition is, rather, more likely to develop into fine cuisine. We must move toward food that people around the world eat with relish, choose often, and love. It is time to consider what path our food should take to develop into a fine global cuisine.
