Where does Kimchi come from?
Kimchi comes from the Korean Peninsula. Koreans have salted and fermented vegetables for well over a thousand years, and kimchi is still eaten with almost every Korean meal, though for most of its history it was not red at all.
Pickles in earthenware jars
The Samguk Sagi, a history of Korea's Three Kingdoms, mentions jars used to ferment vegetables, a sign that pickles were already common then. In the 13th century the scholar Yi Gyubo wrote a poem showing that radish kimchi was a familiar dish under the Goryeo dynasty: 'Radish preserved in salt is a winter side dish from start to end.' Before refrigerators, winter kimchi was kept in earthenware pots called onggi, buried in the ground so that it would not freeze.
How kimchi turned red
Early records of kimchi mention neither garlic nor chili. Chili peppers, native to the Americas, were brought to East Asia by Portuguese traders and reached Korea around 1600; the first mention there is in Jibong yuseol, an encyclopedia published in 1614. Only in the 19th century did chili become common in kimchi. Napa cabbage, the base of today's most common kimchi, reached Korea at the end of that century, and a cookbook of that time describes whole-cabbage kimchi like today's.
Why people think of Japan or China
Pickled vegetables are eaten across East Asia, and kimchi has ties to both neighbours. Its main vegetable is often called Chinese cabbage, and an early form of its name, thimchoy, transcribed a word written in Chinese characters meaning 'submerged vegetable'. Japan makes its own version, sold as kimuchi. But kimchi is Korean, and so is kimjang: every late autumn communities gather to make and share enough kimchi to last the winter, a custom UNESCO inscribed in 2013.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Kimchi ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Kimjang ↗ · ich.unesco.org ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Gochugaru ↗
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