Bulgogi Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Bulgogi is a Korean beef dish: thin-sliced beef seasoned with soy sauce, sugar, and sesame oil, then grilled over an open flame or on an iron plate. The word itself is already in print in 1922, in Hyeon Jin-geon's story Tarakja, serialized that year in the magazine Gaebyeok. There it appears as bulgogit-deongi, "a lump of grilled meat," once, in a sentence that likens someone's face to meat roasting over glowing charcoal, and it reads as grilled meat in general rather than as the name of a dish. The word turns up again in a 1927 book titled 古蹟と風俗 (Historic Sites and Customs), in the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper (1935), and in the magazine Samcheolli (1936), among other places. Its first entry as a headword in a dictionary is said to be the third volume of the Hangeul Society's Keun Sajeon (1950), and its first appearance in a cookbook Bang Sin-yeong's Godeung yori silseup (1958).

Beef, the dish's centerpiece, was a long-established food on the peninsula, and soy sauce and sesame oil were to be had locally. Beef cut into broad, thin slices and grilled was known in the royal court and in the yangban households of Seoul as neobiani, a name meaning meat sliced wide, and bulgogi itself used to go by that name.

According to a 2013 study tracing a hundred years of bulgogi, grill-net bulgogi descended from neobiani emerged as a commercial dish between the 1920s and the 1960s, and from the 1960s to the 1990s a juicier, brothier bulgogi appeared and spread. Bulgogi is said to have become a dish of the general public after 1970. Over the twentieth century, then, grilled beef from the court and yangban table became something sold in town, and came to be eaten widely as thin slices steeped in a sweet-savory marinade.

The origin most fondly told for bulgogi takes the maekjeok of Goguryeo as a distant ancestor, with a single line running from there down to modern bulgogi. Some dictionaries and popular explanations cite the old Chinese text Soushen Ji as the evidence.

In the seventh volume of the Soushen Ji, however, maekjeok—read in Chinese as mozhi—appears in the line "Qiang stew and mo roast are the foods of the Di": it is named alongside a Qiang stew as a food of the Di, a word for foreign peoples. The passage records that from the Taishi era of the Jin dynasty onward such foreign vessels and foods came into fashion in China, and reads this as an omen of foreign invasion. Goguryeo is not named anywhere in it, and it says nothing about soy paste, garlic, skewers, or marinating. The earlier Han-era dictionary Shiming explains mozhi as a whole carcass roasted, from which each person cuts pieces with a knife, a practice that came from the peoples called Hu and Mo. In the way it is made, it is a different thing from today's bulgogi of thin slices in a sweet-savory marinade.

Another line tying maekjeok to old Korean grilled meat is a sentence in Choe Nam-seon's book Gosatong: "maekjeok, that is, Buyeo-style grilled meat." A 2016 article by Go Yeong in the Hankook Ilbo calls this idea "a baseless story passed off as history" and points out that Choe gave no argument for the assertion.

The story that runs a single direct line from the maekjeok of Goguryeo to modern bulgogi has no footing in what these old texts say. The settled view is that bulgogi in its present form took shape in the twentieth century from the neobiani of the court and yangban households. That does not erase the older layer of grilled meat. Some Korean food-culture research traces a long lineage from maekjeok through neobiani to bulgogi, and maekjeok remains a grilled meat recorded in ancient Chinese books. What does not hold is the account that joins that older layer to modern bulgogi in one direct line and claims the old texts record it.