A Brief History of Korean Cookbooks in America

Howdy cookbook fans!

And welcome to an exciting offering from journalist Helin Jung! Helin has written a lovely exploration of the history of Korean cookbooks in the US, which have seen an explosion in popularity over the years. But they took awhile to catch on, for a lot of reasons, which Helin lays out below. It’s a dense, smart, spectacular read that starts with a racist accounting of “Queer Korean Food” from 1904 and ends looking with hopeful eyes towards the upcoming, highly anticipated Sohn-Mat by Monica Lee, former-owner of the beloved, shuttered Koreatown staple Beverly Soon Tofu, written with Tien Nguyen. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Here’s Helin.

A Brief History of Korean Cookbooks in America

—Helin Jung

Korean Food Gets a Rough Start in the US

In 1904, a wire story headlined "Queer Korean Food" circulated in newspapers from West Virginia to Kansas. A year earlier, the first Korean immigrants to Hawaii had arrived to work the sugar plantations. The Korean population in the United States only numbered in the thousands. This unbylined newspaper bulletin described the Korean diet: 

The Korean is omnivorous. Birds of the air, beasts of the field, and fish from the sea—nothing comes amiss to his palate. Dog meat is in great request at certain seasons, pork and beef with the blood undrained from the carcass; fowls and game—birds cooked with the lights, giblets, heads, and claws intact; fish, sundried and highly malodorous—all are acceptable to him. Cooking is not always necessary; a species of small fish is preferred raw, dipped into some piquant sauce. Other dainties are dried seaweed, shrimps, vermicelli, pine seeds, lily bulbs and all vegetables and cereals. Their excesses make the Korean martyrs to indigestion.

Korea, which had been open to trade for a single generation, was unknown to Americans. News from the Hermit Kingdom arrived via travelogues from Christian missionaries like Ethel E. Kestler, who often mentioned being so revolted that they refused to eat. (At a table laden with 18 different bowls of the "choicest Korean food," Kestler wrote in a letter that ran on the front page of The Monroe Journal in 1906, but "not appetizing in either odor or looks," "I did not have sufficient curiosity to investigate to find out.") 

Prejudice is a natural response when faced with the unfamiliar. Disgust catches easily. They said the food