Proto-bulgogi (native grilled-meat proto-layer) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Long before bulgogi itself, an older layer of grilled meat lay on the Korean peninsula.

Follow the history of Korean grilled beef far enough back and you arrive at the ancient maekjeok. Remembered as the skewered meat of the Maek people, it is often cited as a name that marks how old meat-eating on the peninsula runs. Later, a seasoned skewered meat called seoryamyeok appears in the written record. Thin slices of beef were tenderized with the back of a knife, threaded on skewers, brushed with oil and salt, grilled over charcoal, dipped in water and grilled again, three times over, then finished with a coat of sesame oil. An eighteenth-century cookbook sets down this patient method in careful detail. In the palace and among the yangban, the aristocratic class of the Joseon court, a thin sliced marinated grill called neobiani appears; the very name belonged to the vocabulary of the court and the upper households.

The beef these dishes rest on, and the fermented soy seasonings and sesame oil that flavored them, were all long-established local foods, on the peninsula's tables from early on. Grilling, and the practice of cutting meat thin, needed no special equipment. So this old layer of grilled meat was carried down over a long stretch of time within the narrow circle of the palace and the aristocracy.

Even so, it was not the everyday dish shared by all, as bulgogi is today. The ancient meat grilled on skewers, the thin sliced meat grilled at court, and the sweet marinated grill that spread in the modern era belong to one broad current of grilled meat, yet their taste and the people who made them are not the same. No firm evidence in the sources ties the old grilled meat and today's bulgogi into a single unbroken line.

Korean grilled beef has come down in one continuous thread since antiquity, or so the familiar telling goes: from maekjeok through neobiani to today's bulgogi, recounted as a single unbroken tradition.

That telling needs to be split in two. That an old layer of grilled meat genuinely existed is not in doubt. Seasoned grilled meat leaves a trail through the cookbooks: the seventeenth-century Eumsik dimibang records a mention of seoryamyeok, and the Sanlim gyeongje of the early eighteenth century sets down its detailed method. Two cookbooks carry it, not one, so this is not the testimony of a single tale; later recipe books are said to pass the dish on.

Neobiani, for its part, comes down as a word used in the palace and in the yangban households of Seoul, and yet, as a recent study of the lineage notes, the name does not appear in the official records of the dynasty. The earliest record of neobiani known so far is an entry in Siuijeonseo, a cookbook of the late nineteenth century. Around the same time the name surfaces in bilingual dictionaries: a Korean-French dictionary of 1880 carries neobuhalmi, taken to be the same dish, and a Korean-English dictionary of 1897 carries neobiani itself. For a food remembered as court cuisine, the pages that hold its name are a cookbook and two dictionaries rather than the records of the court. That grilled meat has long been practiced on the peninsula is fair to grant.

The trouble lies with the other view, the one that takes that old layer as the direct ancestor of today's bulgogi. The claim that maekjeok descends directly from Goguryeo cuisine leans on an old Chinese collection of tales that contains no account of Goguryeo itself, and no artifact comes forward to support it. The very move of calling maekjeok a Buyeo-Goguryeo style roast was made first in 1937, by Choi Nam-sun writing in the newspaper Maeil Sinbo, as the same study points out; the telling of an unbroken line from antiquity is itself a product of the twentieth century. And the sweet-marinated style of thin sliced beef took hold only in the twentieth century, when grilled meat was sold as a commodity and its form was standardized, as a separate study in food history shows. The shape called seasoned grilled meat runs through generations of cookbooks, but whether that thread can be drawn straight to today's bulgogi is a separate question. What shaped the bulgogi of today was not something handed down from antiquity but the modern city and its commerce. The age of grilled meat as a genre is not denied. But that age must not be laid over the age of today's bulgogi as if they were one. The old grilled meat and the bulgogi of today are best measured by different clocks. That is where the reading of this dish lies.