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The Oldest Cookbook in Korean
- codezero 6y agoIt still blows my mind how recent in history humans have been able to pass information into the future or across great distances. It’s amazing we know anything.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoAnd why oral history was such an important part of so many ancient cultures.
- codezero 6y agoI've been thinking about that a lot lately (mostly in terms of my own memory) and a fun random thing I've been thinking of is that it's really impossible (at least to me) to visualize something with any meaningful fidelity. I can describe a scene, but that's just my description, it's so blurry. When I hear a song I like, I can pretty much repeat it note for note when I whistle, and it conveys really the same feeling and meaning, but it's also a bit blurry on account of the details getting fuzzier like lyrics, specific instruments etc... but it feels a lot more authentic to the original memory/experience than anything I can ever visualize. What I'm saying, is that I wonder if there's something special about how spoken/vocal memory sticks vs other kinds of memory.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dontcarethrow2 6y agoI noticed that there is something there about vocal compared to visual. Some years ago while messing around memorizing/reciting pi, I always thought I imagined the numbers visually and recited from there. I'm bilingual and a friend asked if I can do it in my mother tongue. It was weird, I was surprised I was struggling. I definitely recite(in my head) in English, then I visualize the numbers than I translate. It was surprising because when I was even younger I thought I had a photographic memory, I noticed it got weak over time and with memorizing some of pi I thought I was bringing it back. And here I find it was mainly vocal. With the points brought up here for oral tradition, it makes sense that vocal memory has stayed strong.
- codezero 6y agoI wonder if it’s mostly about the cardinality of the options. Songs are made up of only a few discrete notes, but strung together, but visual memory doesn’t really have a good analog. Pixels? That’s not how we think. Maybe there is a way to remember a visual scene, the closest I can think of is the memory palace technique, and it’s just damn hard to hone, but it really is effective. I think the trickiest thing is error correction. In a song, a missed note is a riff, and likely close to the real note, in memory palace, there’s a risk it’s just way off and even that being way off fucks up the next step in recall, with no way to repair it.
- HenryKissinger 6y agoAnd now we have discussion boards like this one which will be a goldmine for future historians.
- codezero 6y agoCall me a cynic, but this is noisy garbage. I immediately caught myself, because I worked on a project that made great use of noise to do science. Hmm. I’m not convinced more because there is no public, long term effort to save this information outside of closed warehouses. I have a hard time finding proof that I existed and worked in tech in the 90s, if Google is any standard for the persistence of data, and tbh, I’m not sure what else would be. Archive.org is not super accessible for exploring - I can’t find my old site because it was on a sub domain I forget. Anyways, I think humans will mine our convos, but won’t need the prior, maybe because the social context doesn’t apply in the future as well I dunno. Shit, what if someone puts this comment into whatever they call textbooks in the future. Check my soundcloud Adding emoji to make it more annoying to parse. Heéhë (HN didn’t include my multi-code point flexing arm emoji)
- mindentropy 6y agoIt was a very important part in the Indian culture. From what I have experienced writing was important yes, but what they usually say is to have a teacher or a Guru. Whenever I read/recite the stotras/mantras the interpretation and the recital of it is so important that I feel a Guru is very important to understand the deeper meaning even though a description of it is present. In the modern world I listen to youtube to get the recitals/rythm right. This is the same with cooking. My Grandmother had I think just one cookbook all her life. All that she learnt was practical by doing it from a very young age. All measurements and learning was from memory and if there were variations it would be derived from her already base cooking knowledge. Her memory of all these would be refreshed periodically because of the necessity to celebrate festivals with different types of dishes specific to the festival. For this it would not be one person slogging but a group of women get together to make the dish and information exchange would happen.
- dionian 6y agoeven more amazing when you realize this was just the first one in the newer Korean script, and they had much older ones in the traditional Chinese script that was widely used by Koreans until recently.
- lehi 6y agoIt's interesting to see what Old World cuisine looked like before the spread of New World ingredients. Editing in a quote from the article for repliers: 'Notably, there’s no mention of gochugaru, the staple spice of Korean cuisine. Although gochugaru, made from New World chile peppers, became available during Lady Jang’s lifetime, “the book is really about the royal cuisine of her ancestors, when gochugaru was not available,” notes Lady Jo.'
- ginko 6y agoThis cookbook is from around 1670, almost 200 years after the discovery of the New World.
- frutiger 6y agoAs per ginko, this is post Columbian Exchange. However there are older cookbooks, e.g. from 1390[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury.
- gerdesj 6y agoPerhaps, but this article is celebrating an ancient cookbook from Korea and not England. Not only that but: "Some historians even believe it could be the first cookbook written by a woman in all of East Asia." I am not familiar with the sexual politics/subtleties surrounding food, let alone writing about it, in East Asia. I suspect, given what I know from these parts (England), that women in East Asia had few opportunities to express themselves in any form, let alone a book that comes down through the centuries to today. I suggest that Jang Gye-hyang did remarkably well and ought to be thought of as one of the fore-founders of a part of modern food. Here in the UK we have Mrs Beeton as a similar example (albeit rather later.)
- frutiger 6y agoI was replying to lehi’s comment about food pre-Columbian exchange. I’m not disparaging the author of this cookbook.
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- supernova87a 6y agoI think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese. They are not. The languages must have come first / evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce / scholarly / government influence over centuries propagated Chinese writing to them. So the spoken language uses Chinese based characters to record the sounds in writing, but it may not necessarily have relation to what the sounds are in Chinese if someone were to read the characters as if Chinese. And the spoken language is not at all related to Chinese (aside from some imported words). As if someone encountered English alphabet words being spoken with totally different sounds assigned to them. That was very interesting to finally understand -- if I've even gotten it all correct...
- gibolt 6y agoI'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. Words can independently change and evolve over time, while still using the same base. As a Chinese speaker, Korean very much sounds closeish and Japanese is often similar enough to realize a distant split. It is important to remember that all branches of a tree grow. China has thousands of dialects all co-evolving and we don't know which the others could have split from and how far either has changed
- awl130 6y agoHis conclusion is sound while yours is not. Korean is not a dialect of Chinese, which seems to be your implication. Neither is it a "branch" of a tree of which Chinese is the trunk. In linguistic terms it is called a "language isolate". In the past, linguists tended to group Korean and Japanese together; I believe largely for political reasons they have been separated--but that's another topic. Korean uses many Chinese loan words (in the same way that English uses Greek loan words) but the sentence structure, pronunciation and grammar are totally different. You would not say English is a dialect or branch of Greek for the same reason. I speak both Korean, Japanese and am currently studying Chinese. Korean does not sound like Mandarin at all because it is not a tonal language. It does sound similar to Mongolian and Manchurian. That is not surprising because the roots of Koreans (and probably their current language) come from the area north of Korea near Manchuria.
- elhudy 6y agoDoes anyone have a link to an ebook copy or scan?
- jzer0cool 6y agoAny reference to the original cookbook (translated or not)?
- yorwba 6y agoKorean Wikisource: https://ko.wikisource.org/wiki/%EC%9D%8C%EC%8B%9D%EB%94%94%EB%AF%B8%EB%B0%A9 https://ko.wikisource.org/wiki/%EC%9D%8C%EC%8B%9D%EB%94%94%E...
- xenihn 6y ago>In one of Lady Jo’s many anecdotes about Lady Jang, she describes how the noblewoman would look down at the village during dinnertime, to see which homes did not have smoke rising from the kitchen, meaning the household had no rice to cook. She would then invite families in need to work on her land so she could feed them. “Even the term ‘superwoman’ is not enough to describe Grandma Jang,” Lady Jo says. I'm extremely confused by this take. Nobles have an obligation to not let their cattle starve to death. This excerpt makes it sound like she's being charitable by letting her peasants plant, grow, and harvest the food that is then used to compensate them for their labor.
- jinwoo68 6y agoYou're assuming that Korean political/economic system was the same as the one of Europe. It was not. Nobles didn't own all the lands or people around them. Some of non-noble people owned their own lands, others didn't and had to rent lands from landlords. So the story that you quoted means that Grandma Jang was generous to poor people who have neither lands nor money to rent lands, and allowed them to work on her lands.
- papul1993 6y agoThis reminds me of the Korean TV drama series Dae Jang Geum also known as Jewel in the Palace.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dae_Jang_Geum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dae_Jang_Geum
- bane 6y agoSomething of note, Hangul was generally rejected among the literate elites in Korean society for centuries, which were mostly men. However, it found unexpected life as a written language for women, who otherwise didn't have opportunities to learn Chinese script. While some written material exists of Hangul being used to communicate between a man and a woman (usually a husband and wife), evidencing that men could read and write Hangul as well -- which is not surprising as it's fascinatingly easy to learn to read -- most ancient Hangul documents we find were written by some for women. It wasn't until the 20th century, partially as a counter occupation rise of national and ethnic identity against the Japanese colonizers that Hangul became modernized and accepted as the general script for Koreans. In North Korea, as further assertions of national identity, all remnants of Chinese characters were purged and many loan words were provided with "preferred" native Korean words. In the South, Chinese characters were/are still seen as a prestige study and was even commonly mixed in with Hangul in newspapers but the use of Hanja is rapidly declining in print.
- b34r 6y ago> she describes how the noblewoman would look down at the village during dinnertime, to see which homes did not have smoke rising from the kitchen, meaning the household had no rice to cook. She would then invite families in need to work on her land so she could feed them. What a wonderful person. I’m glad her work is being preserved and honored.