At first, the revival of Korean royal cuisine was largely confined to the academic sphere. In the 1980s, only a few restaurants ventured to serve it, a number of them run by members of Hwang’s family. Then, in 2003, half the country tuned in to the historical TV drama “Jewel in the Palace,” about a 16th-century woman who becomes the king’s chef and personal physician (food, in Korean thinking, is also medicine). The past was remade, and suddenly royal cuisine was all the rage, not only in Korea but throughout Asia. Perhaps emboldened by this success, as well as buoyed by the global Korean food campaign, in 2009 the South Korean government nominated Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 38 for UNESCO’s own heritage list. The glory would belong not just to Koreans but to the world. Indeed, the next year, France would earn a spot for what UNESCO describes on its website as the quintessential French “gastronomic” meal, emphasizing “togetherness, the pleasure of taste and the balance between human beings and the products of nature”; but UNESCO ultimately declined to give the same honor to Korean royal cuisine, on the grounds that more information was needed to understand “how the practice is recreated by its bearers and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity today.”
Cho Eun Hee, a chef at Onjium, a fine-dining restaurant in Seoul with an outpost in Manhattan and part of a research institute focused on traditional Korean culture, studied under Hwang and is one of around only 30 devotees in Korea to be anointed by the government as a protector of royal cuisine. Her approach, however, is that of a scholar, not a guard patrolling the bounds of some exclusive, exclusionary domain. She suggests that the culinary relationship between the king at court and the peasant in the village was less a matter of difference than of degree. Sure, the king would receive the best ingredients, harvested at their peak and brought to the court from all the regions of Korea, where they would be cooked by chefs with decades of training and meticulous attention to detail, shucking the skins off little red beans or carefully carving the bumps off a yuja (more commonly known outside of Korea by its Japanese name, yuzu), packing the peel with julienne jujubes, pine nuts and chestnuts, sealing it in an earthen vessel with a pour of honey, leaving it to ferment for a couple of months, then tossing everything but the peel in order to prepare one of the eight ingredients to be mixed into a festive rice cake. But no foods were off limits to commoners (although they were less likely to eat beef, since they needed cows to till the fields). “Eating royal was not forbidden, just difficult to achieve,” says Seung Hee Lee, a Korean-born epidemiologist in Atlanta who, like Cho, trained in royal cuisine in Seoul and is the co-author, with Kim Sunée, of the cookbook “Everyday Korean” (2017). And everyone ate juk: “Back in the day, if you were to be an eligible bride, you had to know how to make hundreds of kinds of porridge.”
For the chef Jiyeon Lee, a former K-pop star who racked up four No. 1 albums, retired young to America and now runs Heirloom BBQ in Atlanta with fellow chef Cody Taylor, court cuisine is defined not by ancient techniques but by an animating spirit of “respect and sincerity.” This past spring, she collaborated on a royal cuisine-themed pop-up dinner with Seung Hee in which the rigor of detail was so great it took the two of them 10 days to prepare a menu of four courses, including juk; tangpyeong chae with pomegranate seeds and squid-ink and turmeric-stained mung bean jelly; and a whole duck leg glazed seven times with gochujang and soy sauce that had been aged for 10 years. “We wouldn’t really serve meat that way if it were truly royal,” Seung Hee says with a laugh. “The king could not be seen eating meat off the bone — too savage.”
Above all, royal cuisine is delicate. Jiyeon finds such restraint lovely: “You can taste the ingredients,” she says. Cho characterizes the flavors as “clean” and “pure,” belying “the stereotype of Korean food as spicy, salty and forward.” Seung Hee more bluntly scoffs at the ignorance of sommeliers in the West who “pigeonhole Asian cuisine as heavily seasoned” and recommend pairings only of Riesling and Gewürztraminer. Notably, UNESCO was more receptive to South Korea’s next culinary application, on behalf of the famously, triumphantly pungent kimchi, whose preparation method was, as of 2013, inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. (Soon after, in one of the absurdities of geopolitics, North Korea petitioned for and was granted recognition of its own kimchi tradition.)
