Pre-history of kimchi (pre-chili salted vegetables / chimchae) Period COrigin theory CVerified

What is treated here is kimchi before the chili — vegetables salted and left to ferment through lactic acid. Chimchae, dongchimi, and the so-called white kimchi belong to this. It is the old forerunner of the red kimchi of today. Both the vegetables at its center and the salt that seasons them are local materials, long present on the Korean peninsula and long a part of people's kitchens.

The oldest record that can be traced as firm evidence lies in the Goryeo period. The Dongguk Isang-gukjip, written by the poet Yi Gyu-bo in the thirteenth century, has verse describing radish salted in summer and preserved in salt for winter. The vegetable in these lines is not napa cabbage but radish, quite different in form from today's red kimchi.

The lineage of the words tells of this antiquity too. The old suffix -ji for pickles, and the character jeo, have named pickled foods since very early on. From there the word chimchae (dimchae) appeared, and in time shifted toward the word kimchi. The word chimchae itself first appears in the written record in the Sohak Eonhae of 1586, at the end of the sixteenth century.

The method is to pack the vegetables in salt and leave them to lactic fermentation. Vegetables are packed into earthenware jars and left to rest, so that they remain edible as the seasons turn. This was not a special dish of the court but a household preserve — a piece of everyday wisdom for getting through the lean season for vegetables, carried on in ordinary kitchens generation after generation.

To say that kimchi is old often runs together two different antiquities: the age of red kimchi, and the age of the pickle that came before the chili. These two are what need untangling: the salted, fermented vegetable with no chili and no napa cabbage belongs to a separate, older layer than red kimchi.

What has shaken this earlier history most is the claim that the chili pepper grew wild on the Korean peninsula more than two thousand years ago. Citing figurative expressions in the Samguk Sagi and the like, it holds that chili was not foreign but present in Korea since antiquity, and so denies the very idea of a chili-less white kimchi forerunner. A part of the scholarly literature has at times carried this claim as a mention.

But the claim collides with both the pedigree of the plant and the written record. The chili pepper is native to the New World, a crop that spread to the Old World through the Columbian exchange. The earliest Korean text to touch on chili is the Jibong Yuseol of 1614, whose author Yi Su-gwang calls it the southern-barbarian pepper and states plainly that it came from outside. Its arrival is placed from around the Imjin War of 1592 into the early seventeenth century. The story of native growth since antiquity runs head-on against the path the chili actually traveled. And if pickles were being eaten before the chili crossed the sea to Korea, those pickles cannot have been red — the claim of ancient native chili, far from erasing the white-kimchi forerunner it set out to deny, only brings it into relief.

What remains as firm ground is the Goryeo period. Yi Gyu-bo's Dongguk Isang-gukjip of the thirteenth century leaves a record of radish pickled in salt and in soybean paste, and this gives a solid lower bound in the written record. Reaching further back, some trace the custom of salting to the Three Kingdoms period. The Records of the Eastern Barbarians in the Wei Chronicle of the Sanguozhi, set down in the third century, says that people of the Korean peninsula pickled vegetables and ate them, and the Samguk Sagi mentions the jars used for fermentation. Yet the Three Kingdoms records amount only to indirect mentions of pickled food in general; the name chimchae and its concrete form do not come into view as firmly as in the Goryeo period.

Salted vegetables without chili, named as such, come clearly into the written record in the thirteenth century of Goryeo. That an older layer lay behind them is hinted at by the Three Kingdoms records, but what form those pickles took remains sunk beyond the reach of the surviving sources.