Is kimchi traditional only in Korea?
Koreans have had kimchi from time immemorial and is an essential
food for them whose main diet is rice. It is also an inevitable
development to preserve vegetables for the winter times when they are
scarce. Then, thinking why there is kimchi at all, what methods do
other peoples in similar conditions use for preserving vegetables?
The most advanced way of preserving vegetables is to ferment them
with salt or vinegar. When we think
of "fermented" food, there are examples in many other cultures too.
Kimchi in the narrow sense can be limited to mean the kind of kimchi
Korean people make with vegetables and other ingredients by salting,
mixing, and fermenting. The best example of this is the
Chinese Cabbage Kimchi.
Chinese cabbage is
salted and rinsed, and mixed with assorted items like vegetables
including radish,
leaf mustard,
dropwort, seafoods including
fish juice,
oyster and flavorings including
garlic, scallion,
chili, and ginger
and fermented. Both the liquid and solid are served and eaten. The meaning of
the word can be extended to include various foods pickled in salt or in vinegar
for the solid part only. Examples include salt-pickled
cucumber, salt-pickled radish,
soy sauce-pickled radish, and vinegar-pickled cucumber.
The first kimchi in Korea seems to belong to the kimchi in its wide
sense. Kimchi in its narrow sense began to appear only in the middle
of the Chosen Dynasty.
Kimchi in its wide sense, pickles in other word, are not unique to
Korea. While the pickles in other parts of the world have never been
developed further than just immersing vegetables in salt solution or
vinegar, Korean kimchi has become a more developed type of pickles.
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