We do not know whether the few Westerners who found themselves in Korea in the 1600s ever cooked Western cuisine and then shared their food with Koreans. In all probability, something like it might have happened, but the Koreans were presumably not sufficiently impressed to describe their culinary experiences in writing. Thus, it is safe to assume that the Western cuisine remained quite unknown in Korea until the 1880s.
When missionaries established the first Korean schools for girls, they ― naturally enough ― began to teach housekeeping. After all, in those pre-feminist times schools were supposed to prepare good Christian wives and mothers for good Christian Korean families. Of course, the housekeeping they taught was Western: partially because the teachers themselves knew no other, and partially because they saw the Western lifestyle as embodiment of civilization which they wanted to spread in Korea. It is known that around 1890 the girls in the Ewha School learned how to cook Western meals.
Around the same time, Western cuisine was sampled by Korean dignitaries who attended receptions in foreign missions. The Russians were especially prominent. Miss Sontag, a sister of the Russian envoy’s wife, was a very skilled chef. She is now remembered as the person who introduced coffee to King Gojong and thus to Koreans, but it was by no means her only exploit. Back in the 1890s she often sent her cookies and other homemade dishes to Queen Min. After all, maintaining warm relations with a powerful and charismatic queen was good diplomacy!
In 1902 Miss Sontag was granted royal permission to open the first modern hotel in Seoul. Among other things, this hotel had a restaurant which mostly served Russian fare (and, frankly, Russian cuisine is not so very different from that of Western Europe). Some visitors loved the food while others found the restaurant too informal for their taste. Nonetheless, very few patrons of this establishment were Koreans.
Despite these pioneering efforts, Western cuisine came to be known in Korea only in colonial times, and largely through Japan. What passed (and still sometimes passes) in Korea for a Western cuisine is a Japanized version of German cooking. The major meal in this system is the pork cutlet known in Japan as tonkatsu and transcribed as dongaseu in Korea. It is normally served with soup, simple salad, and a choice of rice or bread.
In the 1920s and 1930s, there were only few places in Seoul where one could taste even such a simplified version of Western cooking. There were a couple of restaurants in major hotels, the famous Grill at the Seoul railway station, and a handful of Western restaurants scattered across the more affluent parts of Seoul.
The situation changed in the late 1950s. In those days, Korea was heavily dependent on American food aid which usually came as shipments of wheat and wheat flour. Neither had much to do with traditional Korean cuisine. But the precious calories should not be wasted, and Western style dishes began to spread in Korea. Various kinds of bread enjoyed a particular popularity, supported by the intense propaganda of the alleged nutritional qualities of Western food.
Some food was smuggled out from the U.S. military bases. For example, nearly all the coffee consumed in Korea until the late 1960s came from the bases: the import of coffee into Korea was illegal in that period (coffee was seen as a luxury item, and the government did not want Korean businessmen to waste hard currency on luxury items).
As late as 1975 guide books made it clear that foreign visitors to Korea would have serious difficulties in looking for Western food in Seoul. The books insisted that restaurants could be found only in hotels, while on the street only some surrogates existed. However, by the mid-1980s it was not true anymore. Western restaurants could be found across the country, even in small towns far away from the capital. Indeed, between 1978 and 1993 Western restaurants were the fastest growing segment of the restaurant industry. During those 15 years, their number in Seoul increased almost fifteen-fold, from 646 to 9,586. Over the same time, the number of Chinese eateries tripled, while numbers of Korean and Japanese restaurants increased approximately tenfold.
The late 1980s was also when pizza became widespread. Initially some Western observers believed that Koreans would never accept pizza because of their dislike for cheese and tomato sauce. But they were proven wrong, even if Korean-style pizza normally leaves much to be desired.
But what about home cooking? As is usual with exotic food, people could not easily master the basics of foreign cooking. However, the growth of the pre-cooked food industry saved Korean housewives from the troublesome necessity of studying Western cooking technologies before making a donkaseu. From the 1980s it has been sufficient to place a precooked piece on a pan and put it inside a microwave. A breakfast of toast and coffee has become very common with the more affluent middle class families, too.
And finally, in 1979 the fast food industry arrived in Korea. The soil was ready and fast food chains enjoyed a major success here. But that is another story…
Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul.
Source:Korea Times
