What Was on Korea's Table More Than 350 Years Ago?

Southern Korea, winter of 1658: a farming family sits on the floor around a low table, eating grain cooked with barley and a radish kimchi in brine with not a speck of chili. We spend a year at their table, from the autumn harvest to the barley harvest of early summer, to find out what ordinary Koreans ate more than 350 years ago, and why their kimchi was white.

The bowl of grain and the little side dishes that went with it (banchan), the low tables (soban), radish salted to last the winter, soybean blocks left to mold in straw to make jang (soy sauce and soybean paste), and the single fire that cooked the barley and warmed the floor of the house (ondol). A scholar who wrote in 1614 that chili was a poison; tobacco, which came the same way and which, according to the Dutchman, almost everyone smoked half a century later; a noblewoman's cookbook from around 1670; and the hungry times, when the grain ran out and people ate what the hills provided: wild greens, acorns and the tender inner bark of the pine. All of this comes from the court's Annals, the journal of Hendrick Hamel (a shipwrecked Dutch sailor held in Gangjin during those years), and the Korean manuals, cookbooks and studies listed below.