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 "bulgogi" appears in writing in 1922, an early instance being Hyeon Jin-geon's short story Tarakja, carried in the magazine Gaebyeok, and it keeps surfacing in print thereafter—1926, 1927, 1929, 1931. A 1947 Korean dictionary lists it as "meat grilled directly over charcoal." Trace how the word appears and the present style looks to have come together broadly from the 1920s on.

Beef, the dish's centerpiece, was a long-established food on the peninsula, on everyday tables from early on. Soy sauce, sesame oil, and sugar were all to be had locally. So the novelty of Bulgogi lies instead in the preparation—thin slices of beef steeped in a sweet-savory marinade and grilled—and in the shifting cast of who ate it.

Grilled thin-sliced beef had earlier belonged to the upper table as neobiani, a dish of the royal court and the yangban aristocracy. From the 1920s through the 1960s this broadened into Bulgogi as a commercial dish, and from the 1960s through the 1990s it came down to the popular table as a souped, brothier Bulgogi. On a base of local ingredients, the marinated-and-grilled preparation and the movement of the dish from the elite down to the common table came together, and modern Bulgogi took form.

The origin most fondly told for Bulgogi traces it to the maekjeok of Goguryeo—the skewered grilled meat of the Maek people—as a distant ancestor, with a single unbroken line running from there down to modern Bulgogi. The ring of reaching back to antiquity is a proud one.

Followed to its source, though, this direct-line story comes down to one writer's assertion. Choi Nam-seon (1890–1957) declared, with no argument offered, that "maekjeok is a Buyeo-style grilled meat," and cited nothing. Go to the primary sources and the Chinese old text Soushen Ji, often invoked to tie maekjeok to Goguryeo, in fact contains no mention of Goguryeo at all; it speaks only of the Maek people. Korean reporting that reexamined the original has pointed out this discrepancy. The earliest independent record of maekjeok itself is a single line in the Han-era dictionary Shiming (early third century): a nomad method of roasting the whole and each person cutting off a piece with a knife. There is no spice, no skewer, no marinade in it. It is a different thing from today's Bulgogi of sweet-savory marinated thin slices.

So the view of the origin has settled away from the ancient direct-line theory and onto a modern formation. The word "bulgogi" first appears in writing in 1922; food-culture research that has followed the shift from the court and yangban neobiani to commercial Bulgogi across a span of a century, together with an encyclopedia that records neobiani as a term of the court and the yangban, supports the modern side. With the first attestation of the word now fixed at 1922, placing the formation in the 1920s has become firmer than before.

None of this erases the old layer of native grilled meat—maekjeok, neobiani—itself. That there was a culture of grilled meat in antiquity is denied by no one. What has collapsed is the account that joins that old layer to modern Bulgogi in a single direct line.