For most of its history, kimchi contained no chilli at all
Kimchi's fiery red colour is a relatively recent addition. Chillies are a New World crop that Portuguese traders brought to East Asia, and Korea's first written mention of them dates from 1614. Early records of kimchi mention neither chilli nor garlic, and spicy versions only became widespread in the 19th century.
At heart kimchi is salted, fermented vegetables, usually Chinese cabbage or Korean radish, seasoned with chilli powder, spring onion, garlic, ginger and salted seafood. There are hundreds of variants, and it appears as a side dish at almost every Korean meal. The Samguk Sagi, a chronicle of Korea's Three Kingdoms, mentions jars for fermenting vegetables, and the habit spread in the Silla era as Buddhism encouraged vegetarian eating. A 13th-century poem by Yi Gyubo describes radish preserved in salt as a winter staple.
Even the cabbage is newer than people assume. Napa cabbage only reached Korea at the end of the 19th century, when a cookbook first described whole-cabbage kimchi resembling today's. The word itself has a long trail: it descends from a Middle Korean form, thimchoy, meaning submerged vegetable, which shifted sound by sound over centuries into kimchi.
Making winter kimchi, called gimjang, was once a whole-village job. The results went into earthenware onggi pots buried in the ground so they would not freeze in winter and would ferment slowly in summer; special kimchi refrigerators now do that work in many homes. South Korea's gimjang tradition joined UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2013 and North Korea's kimchi-making in 2015. North Korean kimchi tends to be milder and less red, with less salt and extra sugar to help fermentation in the cold.
The dish has had adventures. During the Vietnam War, Seoul's wish to supply its troops drove industrial production. In 2008 scientists made a bacteria-free space kimchi for Yi So-yeon, Korea's first astronaut, fearing cosmic rays might mutate the microbes. When heavy rain in 2010 sent cabbage prices soaring, some restaurants stopped serving kimchi free, and the government cut tariffs on imported cabbage. A 2001 international standard defined kimchi as salted napa cabbage fermented at low temperature.
Source: Kimchi
