Boribap보리밥

Barley is believed to have been a staple for ordinary Koreans since the Three Kingdoms period. It appears in the founding myth of Goguryeo's King Jumong, the chronicle Samguk Sagi records good barley harvests, and barley has been excavated from a Baekje military granary site. Easier to grow than rice, it fed those who could rarely afford rice, and in the Joseon era people of every rank ate a lot of it in summer. King Yeongjo is said to have liked a summer royal table of barley rice (보리밥, boribap) with just a few side dishes, and the scholar Jeong Yak-yong wrote a poem about farmers rolling barley rice up in lettuce and eating it with gochujang and scallion roots.

Barley rice was hard, though, and tricky to cook. In Imwon Gyeongjeji, Seo Yu-gu advised soaking barley for half a day or a full day first, which made the rice soft and tasty and saved firewood too. The months of March and April, when the old grain ran out and everyone waited for the barley to ripen, were known as borit-gogae, the "barley hump," and on Jeju Island barley rice remained the everyday staple into the 1960s.

In the 1950s and '60s the government encouraged honsik, mixing barley or other grains into rice. After the high-yield Tongil rice variety spread from 1971 and farming shifted toward rice around 1977, barley production fell sharply, and from the 1980s barley rice stopped being an everyday home meal and became a dish people seek out. It is best mixed with young radish kimchi or gochujang, with green chilies dipped in doenjang on the side.