Japchae (Mixed Vegetable Medley)

History

Eumsik dimibang, the handwritten Korean-language cookbook compiled around 1670 by Jang Gye-hyang, is routinely cited as holding the earliest surviving written recipe for japchae. The name is Sino-Korean for “mixed vegetables” (雜菜), and Jang’s dish is exactly that: julienned raw and boiled seasonal produce and mushrooms — cucumber, radish, bellflower root, pine and oak mushrooms, bean sprouts — with shredded pheasant, bound in a thickened pheasant-broth-and-fermented-bean sauce and prized for its many colors. Crucially it contains no glass noodles; the sweet-potato-starch dangmyeon that defines japchae today is entirely absent. Those noodles are a modern addition, entering the dish through Seoul’s Chinese restaurants in the early 1920s, with Bang Sin-yeong’s 1921 Joseon yori jebeop recording an early Korean dangmyeon method. Korean tradition traces the dish’s court origins slightly earlier still, to Yi Chung (1568–1619), said to have served an early japchae at King Gwanghaegun’s banquet — so Jang is best read as an early recorder, not the inventor. Because the book predates chili’s spread into the region, its pungency comes from cheoncho (Sichuan pepper), black pepper and ginger, never gochujang. Eumsik dimibang is itself celebrated as the first cookbook written by a woman in East Asia.

Ingredients

• cucumber, radish, large radish
• jini, seogi, pyogo, songi mushrooms
• mung-bean sprouts
• bellflower root (doraji), dried gourd shavings, water dropwort (minari), scallion, fatsia shoots (durup), bracken (gosari), sorrel, winter melon, eggplant, wild greens
• ginger (or dried ginger), black pepper, sesame oil, soy sauce, wheat flour
• pheasant
• cockscomb (maendurami) flower / bellflower red juice
• Sichuan pepper (cheoncho) and black pepper

Instructions

1. Use cucumber, radishes, mushrooms, and mung-bean sprouts raw.
2. Boil bellflower root, gourd shavings, dropwort, scallion, fatsia, bracken, sorrel, winter melon, eggplant, and wild greens; tear fine.
3. Cut each ingredient ~1 chi and fry each separately in oil and soy.
4. Arrange in a large bowl, combined or separate; pour moderate sauce over and top with Sichuan pepper, black pepper, ginger.
5. Sauce: chop pheasant, strain thick soy lightly salted, add sesame oil and wheat flour, boil once — keep it thin.
6. Dye winter melon red with bellflower/cockscomb juice if color is wanted; use only the ingredients on hand.