Seoul now ‘The Big Cabbage’

Press, 24 September 1988, Page 30

Seoul now ‘The Big Cabbage’

NZPA-Reuter Seoul American visitors from “The Big Apple” are dubbing Seoul “The Big Cabbage.” The reason, as the nose of any visitor to the Olympic host nation soon discovers, is that pickled vegetables, known as kimchi, play a vital role in the Korean diet. There is kimchi for breakfast, kimchi for lunch and still more of the powerfully aromatic concoction for dinner. Coupled with the other local delight — garlic — the Korean diet produces an aroma that is as unmistakable to the traveller as Gitane cigarette smoke in Paris. At its basic level — and there are hundreds of

variations — kimchi is a mix of cabbage or other vegetables, sometimes including seafood, which are soaked in brine, drained and generously spiced with hot pepper. With rice as its partner, kimchi is the staple meal of all Koreans, North and South. Although New York and Seoul are a world apart, first-time visitors to Korea have been quick to grasp kimchi’s significance in national folklore. “You can see it and smell it everywhere,” said an Olympic tourist, Ken Johnson, from Brooklyn. “I don’t like the idea of eating kimchi with every meal, but a mouthful at dinner is just fine. “I’m a part of the Big

Apple so it’s nice to try the Big Cabbage.” A Korean housewife’s culinary prowess is judged first and foremost by her ability to provide delicious kimchi that will keep her family warm — and laden with vitamin C — throughout the long winter months. In the coming weeks, towering stacks of Chinese cabbage, the main ingredient, and giant white radishes will be appearing on roadside foodstalls throughout South Korea. Then begins one of Korea’s most important annual social events, Kimjang, when housewives are joined by their friends and relations to prepare a large cache of winter kimchi. Huge pots of kimchi are

then either buried in the garden or stacked on apartment block balconies to stop it fermenting too quickly indoors.

No-one in Korea has any firm idea about how or when kimchi originated, although similar concoctions are produced in parts of China. Similarly, it seems, few New Yorkers can offer clues to the origins of their city’s soubriquet of the Big Apple. One theory is that jazz musicians in the 1920 s and 1930 s said they were “taking a bite at the apple” when asked to play in New York. There was also a popular dance of the Depression era known as the Big Apple, which became synonymous with New York clubs.