Cooking is a quote from a restaurant that first appeared in “Cooking Restaurant” (Hanseongjubo, October 4, 1886) and used to make and sell food in the late Joseon Dynasty, which means processed food or processing itself. In the act of processing food ingredients, “jori” is also used as a noun, but it is not called “jori” by looking at food. In Chinese characters, cooking means making food by properly controlling ingredients, that is, making food easier to eat, and cooking means “food” or “food” itself.
Eating raw carcasses of plants or animals causes considerable strain on digestion and is a major cause of pathogen or parasite infection. Proper food processing techniques are recognized as a very important survival factor in human history, as there are quite a few ingredients that lead to death if toxins are not removed or neutralized. Therefore, the first purpose of cooking and cooking is to process ingredients into a form suitable and safe for humans to digest while minimizing the destruction of nutrients possessed by living things.
It is also called the act of distinguishing between animals and humans. Humans, who used to eat animals and plants obtained from hunting and gathering raw in the past, accidentally began to eat the bodies of animals burned down by forest fires or lightning, and found that they were better in many ways than raw ones. As such “burnt food” began to be artificially reproduced, for the first time, an act that could be called cooking was made.
If the first purpose of cooking is to process nature and change it to a form suitable for human absorption, the second purpose is to feel better to eat, that is, to make it look good and delicious. In particular, as the food, clothing, and shelter problem are sufficiently solved, the attention is focused on this second purpose of making the dish taste better and look better. When it intensifies, taste is considered more important than the amount of cooking. In other words, of course, this is not necessarily the case, but in general, it is possible to guess the economic situation of the region by looking at the overall cooking culture of a region.
Food culture that can be eaten as full as possible rather than shape and taste: a society that is economically needy and unable to afford
Establishing a food culture that values not only the amount but also the taste and nutrition of food: A society with some economic margin.
Food is reborn as a work of art beyond the boundaries of sheep: a society that is economically rich and relaxed
As of the 2010s, Korea is generally in the form of the second and third coexistence, and almost all of the countries that have developed worldwide are the same. However, in Korea, due to rapid economic growth, cultural perspectives between generations have become clear, so there are many cases where likes and dislikes are divided between the second and third generations. As the most common example, when rating restaurants, even the same restaurant’s rating varies greatly depending on whether they value quality or quantity. Similarly, there are many older generations who consider it a waste of money for young generations to taste at least expensive luxury foods.
The development of overall food culture, including cooking, moves based on these three things. However, cooking does not develop as a single society/state is fixed in one pattern, because the situation is completely different for those who have power such as royalty, aristocrats, bourgeois gentry, or have nothing to go down further, such as serfs and workers. While high-ranking people sublimate food to the level of art or aesthetics, dog pigs tried to eat things that they had never eaten before, or even tried to stop the sheep from being soaked and killed somehow. And the people with better economic conditions played a role in compromising these two things to develop sheep-centered dishes to make them more delicious, or on the contrary, downgrade and generalize the dishes eaten by the superiors. Countries with a somewhat long history of emerging industrial countries generally have their own cooking culture in which these three patterns are mixed and developed. In Korean cuisine, for example, japchae, which was made by cutting and stir-frying various ingredients, was born to somehow try low-quality processed meat, including glass noodles and Japanese soy sauce, and spam leaked through the U.S. military PX, but is now upgrading its taste and ingredients to national food.
In addition, cooking develops through exchanges with other countries or other ethnic groups. These exchanges include both positive exchanges such as trade and negative exchanges such as invasion and war. In some cases, some of the invaders’ food culture remains even after they have been partially assimilated into their culture and restored independence/territory after accepting some of the colony’s food ingredients and cooking techniques while running the colony. The frequent use of Asian ingredients such as curry and ketchup in British cuisine can be said to be the latter case in the former and Vietnamese cuisine, such as Per and Bein Me. The budae jjigae listed above is also a food born during exchanges with the USFK.
Cooking is believed to be mainly done by people who make households in most modern households. As you can see from the chef’s document, it is unexpectedly difficult and difficult heavy labor. It is not usually difficult to deal with tens of thousands of ingredients at the same time, as much of the cooking does not lose heat, and sharp tools such as knives must be handled safely. Gas and smoke from the cooking process also contain first-class carcinogens.