Say kimchi

When I was a child in Korea, every autumn was the kimchi making season for any respectable housewife. No one had yet come up with the idea of selling kimchi, and if they had, no housewife would have wanted to be seen buying the commercial product.

While we children played hopscotch, the mothers would come out to stand on the entrance to the flats to watch us and talk about the price of the Chinese cabbages, the daikon or the cucumbers. We would jump rope, playing something similar to jacks and they would discuss where to get the best fermented shrimp sauce. The news programmes regularly discussed the rise and fall of the price of the Chinese cabbages and how some unscrupulous conmen put sawdust into red chili powder.The delivery boy from the local supermarket would ride his bicycle around the neighbourhood several times every day to deliver boxes of the Chinese cabbages. Some eager housewives went to down to the supermarket themselves on the days the deliveries of the Chinese cabbages came from the farms and they would pick theirs out of the large stack while it was still on the back of the lorry. I liked watching these scenes because the chaos reminded me of the manic atmosphere at Harrods during their annual sale on chinaware, with the straw strewn everywhere and people shouting and pulling at each other.

One year, on the day the delivery boy came to drop off the cabbages at our flat, my mother told me that I should try to help her with this year's kimjang (the proper name for the kimchi making process). I didn't really want to but she was firm about it, and unlike the previous year, we didn't have any of my mother's younger sisters staying with us to help her.

So we started off halving the cabbages, leaving them to soak in brine overnight. Then the next morning we prepared the paste. So many things can be put into the seasoning depending on your taste. My mother tasted some of the smaller leaves of the cabbages and fretted that it was too salty, or not salty enough, depending on the large metal container she was tasting from. We adjusted the seasoning according to the level of salt the cabbages had soaked up.

The red chili pepper powder, sliced chili, soy sauce (light and dark), fermented fish sauce, fermented shrimp sauce, garlic, spring onions, ginger, sugar, salt and whatever my mother felt like putting in - she could add in pieces of Asian pear to make it crispy, or chopped up daikon or sliced cucumber to make it refreshing - was mixed together with my own hands. I cringed everytime she added in a new ingredient - the fish sauce was smelly, the fermented shrimp sauce was slimy and the garlic made my eyes sting. After tasting the seasoning, my mother showed me how to put the paste inside the leaves of the cabbages so that they would mix well.
"You work it from the insides, like this," she said, as she opened up the leaves around the heart of the cabbages.

It was hard work. We sat there stuffing the cabbages until the cabbage halves inside one big round metal container were packed in so tightly that we'd struggle to fit on the lid, then we'd move on to the next container, then the next, and so on. This was our winter store of kimchi. It would last us through until spring.
"I once cut a nerve on my finger because the porcelain kimchi jar I was holding broke,"
my mother said, pointing to some of the brown porcelain jars we had in our kitchen. That was why we normally used those only for making soy sauce or keeping our fermented soy paste. I tasted a little bit of a leaf that had fallen off my cabbage half. It was sweet and still crunchy fresh underneath the red fishy mixture.
"I think I like my kimchi unripe,"
I said. Koreans talk about their kimchi being 'ripe' or 'unripe' when they are referring to the level of fermentation the kimchi has gone through. My mother sniffed at this.
"That's because you are still young and you don't know the real taste of kimchi,"
she said. When the kimchi ripens, it becomes crunchy in a different way - it releases all of the different flavours that have matured during its fermentation. When you slice it through, each piece still has a paleness reflecting the vegetable's original white colour. But after that stage it becomes a bedraggled mess, looking as if it needs a crutch or some other implement to sustain its shape, as it grows limper and darker in colour. That would be when my mother makes lots of kimchi fried rice or stir fried pork with kimchi. But I wasn't fooled that easily and as the winter went by I would refuse to eat any more kimchi.

We stopped for lunch.
"Your grandmother used to make really wonderful kimchi. She would give it out to neighbours and everyone would be astonished at how good it was. When you make really good kimchi, you're not meant to see all of the seasoning, it should be hidden inside the folds of the leaves. You shouldn't really see it all because you're meant to taste it," my mother said.
"Of course I remember her kimchi, what are you saying,"
I said. My grandmother had sent us just one small cabbage she had made when we had first arrived in Seoul. It was really good, and as my mother had said, it was so elegantly made you couldn't see any pieces of red chili powder or the seasoning from the outside. But my grandmother couldn't make any more kimchi - she had dehabilitating arthritis and had been a bedridden invalid even then.
"I still like your kimchi, Mum,"
I said to her. She grinned and said,
"Really? That's a good thing then as this is all you are going to get."