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The direct origin of the food itself, kimchi, is often difficult to trace. To summarize it clearly, it can be traced back to the 'food in the form of salted vegetables and stored for a long time' that appeared to the agricultural people, but on the contrary, it is also ambiguous to say from which point among the Korean people's such foods that have existed for a long time can be called kimchi now.
Such simple vegetable-sauce dishes have existed since the Three Kingdoms Period. In the book "Samgukji", there is a record that says, "In Goguryeo, fermented foods were made and eaten." In the Jeongchangwon manuscript, there is a record that a , similar to the present kimchi, was made and sent to Japan. In addition, fermented foods similar to kimchi are recorded in the Samguk Sagi.
As can be seen from the retrospective of etymology, the original form of the old kimchi was a basic radish, and kimjang was also a custom old enough to go back to the same era as the etymology of kimchi. During the Goryeo Dynasty, early forms of water kimchi, nabak kimchi, and dongchimi appeared, and due to the influence of Goryeo, they were also known in the Yuan Dynasty and were introduced in books such as "Geoga Pilyong".
On the other hand, according to the Joseon Dynasty literature, in the "Hunmongjaenghoe" written by Choi Se-jin in 1527, kimchi is written as "葅" in Chinese characters, and the original 葅 first appears in the Chinese literature "Sigyeong (circa 10th to 7th centuries BC)" and is believed to mean pickled vegetables using cucumbers in ancient China. This is the oldest existing record of pickled vegetables in human history, and it is mentioned as "There is a cucumber in the field, so I make it and serve it to my ancestors (祖)." Over time, the 葅 is used as a verb to refer to the whole pickled vegetables, or the act of pickled vegetables itself. Therefore, through the Hunmongjaengjaenghoe, it can be confirmed that kimchi was recognized as Joseon's representative vegetable salting food, enough to mean 葅 as kimchi by the Joseon Dynasty.
And red cabbage kimchi, a representative food of modern Koreans and known worldwide, was able to appear after peppers originating from the Americas were introduced to East Asia through Portuguese merchants. Although peppers are said to have been transmitted through the Imjin War, they were not used immediately after transmission, and they were recognized as poisonous plants for about 10 years, so they were not used for food, but for ornamental purposes, or just treated as weeds. Then, records show that they began to be cultivated around that time, and the Jeungbo Forest Economy in 1766 shows that peppers were used for kimchi cooking from that time. However, the use of peppers in this era was not made with red pepper powder as it is now, but a few dried peppers were added to add flavor and aroma.
There is a sad story about the entry of red pepper powder, the biggest identity of kimchi now, but when the New Year's Day famine hit, all the wild vegetation dried up, and the price of firewood, an ingredient for making salt, soared. The wood of mountains and fields had to be used not only for salt, but also for firewood for the winter of grasshoppers and other side works, so the price of salt had to skyrocket as a result. To save money on salt prices, people found substitutes for various methods, one of which was red pepper powder. It wasn't just that red pepper powder was used because of the soaring price of salt. In line with the situation of famine at the time, they started to mix ingredients other than salt in addition to having to live on anything, and the representative example is salted fish in Jeollanam-do.