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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