KOREASCHOLAR

War against Japanese(1592-1599) and war against Manchurian(1636-1637), which had been occurred in Korean Peninsula throughout the history, and frequent trade with foreign countries since 18th century have led to a distribution of foreign food into Korea. Several examples for this include tomato, apple, watermelon, maize, pea, cowpea, peanut, potato from China and red pepper, pumpkin, and sweet potato from Japan. Since these foods had been brought into Korea, they have been cultivated suitable for Korea's climate and land. Foreign foods with a few exceptions tend to have high calories. For instance, along with potato and sweet potato, pumpkin is considered a high-calorie food containing lots of starches as it becomes ripening. This helped a wide spread of the foreign foods across the nation where intake of high-calorie foods was critical for Korean people's nutrition at that time. Among those foods introduced from foreign countries, red pepper had a greatest impact on the dietary life-style of Chosun Dynasty. The use of red pepper has been greatly expanded from main ingredient to seasoning and garnishing in various forms of red pepper such as red pepper paste, red pepper powder, and thick soy paste mixed with red pepper. Red pepper was made eating habits is hot besides dye red colored to traditional food, because steaming and boiling is frequently cook method, fermentation food also food color is achromatic therefore food color is and mixture with red pepper, picked fish and chinese cabbage new kimchi culture came into being.

• 차경희 | Cha, Gyung-Hee