Kimchi-bokkeumbap김치볶음밥

Kimchi has gone into soups, rice dishes and dumplings for a very long time, but kimchi fried rice (김치볶음밥) is a fairly young dish. Fried rice needs oil and a pan with a handle for quick stirring over high heat, while old Korean kitchens, built around heavy iron cauldrons set over a fire, favored steaming and boiling. A 1924 cookbook, Joseon Mussang Sinsik Yori Jebeop, does include a Western-style "fry rice" made with butter, but most Koreans first got to know fried rice through the Chinese restaurants that multiplied during the Japanese colonial period.

Cooking oil and frying pans reached ordinary homes in earnest in the 1960s, when fried rice was even promoted as a practical, no-side-dish meal for improving the national diet. A 1965 newspaper recipe for "kimchi fried rice with leftover rice" was closer to pot-cooked rice topped with stir-fried kimchi. Kimchi and rice fried together show up in a 1972 newspaper, which presented it as a Gyeongsang Province dish: stir-fry kimchi and pork in a gochujang sauce, then add cold rice.

The dish truly became everyone's food in the 1980s. Ahead of the 1986 Seoul Asian Games, there was a boom in new kimchi recipes, and in the 1980s and '90s cafés and pubs near universities sold cheap kimchi fried rice at lunchtime. A hit song from 1989, "Huimang Sahang," even listed being good at making kimchi fried rice among the singer's wishes for an ideal partner. Today many people still finish a barbecue or hot-pot meal by frying rice in the leftover juices.