Kimchi and Kimjang Season

Spring, out at sea.

The boats come in, and among the people waiting on the wharf are some who are not buying to eat right away. They are buying seafood to keep. What they buy will be left to ferment, and many months will pass before its turn comes.

While the weather is still warm, nobody is in a hurry to say what it is for.

Summer, at the salt pans.

People buy sea salt. Not a little, but by the bag and by the sack. The salt is carried home and stored away, and it waits too.

Late summer, on the drying yards.

Red chilies cover the yards, cover the rooftops, cover the open patches of ground along the roads. The late-summer sun is still fierce, just right for this work. Once dried, the chilies are put away too, to wait like the salt and the jar of seafood that has been fermenting since spring.

By now three things lie waiting in three corners of the house, gathered over three different seasons.

Then late autumn arrives, and the whole neighborhood does one thing together.

That thing is called kimjang.

Kimjang is the season when a whole community makes kimchi together. Not one jar or two, but a very large amount, enough to feed every household through the winter. Winter in Korea is long and bitterly cold. When the snow comes, the ground freezes, and there are no fresh greens left to pick. Kimchi made in autumn is how people carry the vegetables of autumn right through the winter.

Kimchi, put simply, is salted vegetables, seasoned and mixed with fermented seafood. It sounds simple, but it appears at almost every Korean meal, in rich homes and poor ones, on the coast and in the mountains. It belongs to the whole country, not to any one class or any one region.

And now the three things waiting in those three corners finally make sense. The jar of fermented seafood from spring, the sacks of sea salt from summer, the batch of sun-dried chilies from late summer. Three seasons go ahead to prepare the way for one. People began getting ready for the cold while the weather was at its warmest.

But the most important part of kimjang is not the food. It lies in a single word: together.

Kimjang is not something one person does alone in the kitchen with the door shut. One household goes over to the next. Families with many hands go to help families with few. Relatives, neighbors and friends sit in a circle, each with a task, talking the whole time. When one house is finished, they all move on to another.

And when the work is done, it is shared. Every household sends a portion to the house next door. A lovely custom comes with it: households trade kimchi with one another. This house seasons it one way, that house another, and by trading back and forth everyone gets to taste the skill of the people next door. New methods and each family's own ideas travel with those jars across the whole neighborhood, and build up into a store of knowledge that belongs to the whole region.

The craft is handed down the same way. Within a family, the teacher is usually the mother-in-law, and the learner is the young wife who has just married into the house. She does not learn by listening to lessons. She learns by sitting down beside everyone and working with them, season after season, until she can do it with her own hands. Then, some decades later, it is her turn to sit where her mother-in-law once sat.

In 2013, UNESCO inscribed kimjang on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

What was inscribed was not a recipe. The nomination file pointed instead to what the custom keeps alive for people. It affirms Korean identity. It strengthens cooperation within families. And it reminds the whole community that they live by the rhythm of nature, not outside it.

In other words, what went onto the heritage list was not a few jars of salted vegetables. It was the habit of sitting down together to make them.

That last point is clearest when the whole year is laid out. The seafood has to be bought in spring because that is its season. The salt has to be bought in summer because summer is the salt season. The chilies have to be dried in late summer, while the sun is still strong. And all of it has to be finished before the snow falls. No one can hurry that calendar, and no one can skip a step.

When a pair of hands works the salted greens, one thing is worth remembering. The work is not really cooking at all. It is a neighborhood sitting down together in late autumn, to make sure that by the first month of the new year, no house in the neighborhood goes without kimchi.

Then the jars are put away, and the whole region falls quiet to wait for the snow.