What actually set the food of a true yangban household apart?
This session took a close look at the food culture of the Mukdongdaek household of the Jinju Heo clan in Jinju, Gyeongsangnam-do. The starting point was a book that documents the household's cooking as it has been handed down through the generations — 'Mukdongdaek Naerim Eumsik' ('Handed-Down Foods of Mukdongdaek') — and the group experienced, firsthand, the household's culture and its dishes as described in it. According to the book, its aim is to pass down the family's ways properly by writing out the everyday meals its elders enjoyed — organized across spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and covering seasonal dishes, preserved foods, and ancestral-rite dishes. As a record spanning more than a hundred years, it offers a window onto the food culture eaten across western Gyeongsangnam-do more broadly.
The group also visited a restaurant known for its bok-guk — a soup made by simmering pufferfish — and tasted Jisu makgeolli, widely drunk in the area, taking in Jinju's food culture along the way. Over at Jinju Jungang Market, older residents of the neighborhood were selling wild greens they had foraged themselves.
Just as every region grows its own food culture, the day was about tracing how the food of Jinju in Gyeongsangnam-do came to be what it is, and, within that, what makes Mukdongdaek's cooking distinct. It was also a chance to sit with a real question: how freshly can a story of food that's been passed down for a hundred-plus years land as content for people today?
