Kimchi Period AOrigin theory CVerified

Kimchi as a preserved vegetable—salted and fermented (chimchae, 沈菜)—is genuinely old. But the red, spicy kimchi that comes to mind today differs from its forerunner in both color and heat. Both come from gochu, the chili pepper, a New World crop native to Central and South America.

Until the chili crossed the ocean and reached the Korean peninsula, red kimchi had no way of coming into being. Its arrival is placed at the turn of the seventeenth century; the 1614 Jibong Yuseol (芝峰類説) of Yi Su-gwang records it as "Japanese mustard" (왜겨자, a pepper by way of Japan). At first it was regarded as a poisonous plant, and its rise to the main seasoning of pickles still lay some way off.

The later cookbooks show clearly how the chili took root in pickling. The 1766 Jeungbo sallim gyeongje (增補山林經濟) of Yu Jung-rim describes a range of chili-based kimchi, including chonggak kimchi, marking the stage at which the pepper had become the pickle's leading ingredient. By the late nineteenth century, the Siuijeonseo (是議全書) presents a whole-head napa cabbage kimchi close to today's form. Napa cabbage (baechu) entered Korea in the late nineteenth century, and the modern style standardized alongside it.

Kimchi thus reached its present red form through stages: the chili becoming the main pickling ingredient in the eighteenth century, its wide spread through the nineteenth, and the settling of cabbage kimchi at the century's close. The antiquity of pickling itself sits comfortably with this path. What can be dated is the chili-based modern form; the history of its pale, chili-less forerunner runs older still.

Two stubborn misconceptions cling to kimchi. One holds that the chili is a native Korean plant rather than a New World import; the other treats today's red kimchi as an unbroken line reaching back to Goryeo and antiquity.

The first sits at odds with the settled understanding of food history and plant geography, in which the chili is native to the New World. The second confuses two different things: the genuine antiquity of pickling (chimchae) with the far later date of red kimchi, which presupposes the chili. That the genre of pickles is old, and when red kimchi came into being, are separate questions.

The footing for setting both misconceptions aside lies where three sources of different dates converge on the same window. The 1614 Jibong Yuseol records the chili's appearance as a poisonous plant; the 1766 Jeungbo sallim gyeongje, a cookbook, sets down several kinds of chili kimchi; and the late-nineteenth-century Siuijeonseo attests the settling of cabbage kimchi. An encyclopedia and two cookbooks trace, stage by stage, the path from the chili's arrival to the standardization of the modern form. Academic reviews (Journal of Ethnic Foods, Springer 2023; ScienceDirect 2014) support this sequence. Neither the native-chili claim nor the ancient-continuity claim is borne out by the record; the exact route and date by which the chili arrived, however, still admit more than one account—shown here alongside the accepted view that it came by way of Japan or Portugal.