Our Taste of Home: Banchan
By Julie Chung
Nostalgia isn’t just the flavor I miss in a single dish. It’s the ritual of eating itself. When I think about my childhood, I think of nibbling on the spicy soybean sprouts my mom would feed me with her plastic-covered hands to taste-test for dinner that night. I’d sit at the kitchen table, twiddling my chopsticks around the array of food before me, waiting for my father to come home from work. I felt like those small children watching the tortured seconds go by during the marshmallow test—how much longer could I nibble on stolen bits of kimchi before giving in? Only when my father came home would we all be able to dig in and eat together as a family.
Photo of spicy cod fish stew with eggplant, seaweed, and kimchi on the side, all made by Julie’s mom.
Korean food is communal food. A standard Korean meal usually comes with a collection of banchan (반찬), small side dishes that you eat with your rice, sometimes with the addition of a main course or a broth. In Korean eating, even though each person gets their own individual bowl of rice, you and your neighbor eat from the same plates of banchan. There’s no yours and mine; a table shares all the banchan together.
When I moved away from our Los Angeles home to go to school on the East Coast, I not only missed the spicy, pungent flavors so familiar to me in Korean cuisine but the ritual of eating banchan together. Small side dishes shared on the kitchen table were replaced by metal vats of food in the school cafeteria. Even when my college dining hall later offered store-bought kimchi and bulgogi on a weekly basis for students, it didn’t feel right to eat them from my individual plate.
Apart from the ritual of eating, banchan is special to me because it’s not the individual dish that makes your meal spectacular. It’s the collective combination of the banchan dishes that keep each bite interesting, with flavors ranging from sweet, sour, spicy, fermented, pickled, crunchy, chewy, and more. I love how my mom could make banchan from anything. By memorizing all the prices of goods at the supermarket, she’d only make banchan with items that were in season and on sale. Now, we’ll even make banchan from the veggies growing in our own backyard. Some of my favorite of my mom’s banchan include 부추 김치 (Korean chives kimchi), 가지 나물 (garlic eggplant), 멸치 볶음 (sweet anchovies), 시금치 나물 (spicy spinach), 두부 조림 (marinated tofu), and 열무 김치 (summer radish kimchi). When my extended family got together for holidays such as jesa (ancestral ritual) or seollal (Korean New Year), I could expect to see all of those banchan—and more—on the table, with contributions from both my mom and grandmother. Preparing banchan for a large, hungry family usually justifies putting in the extra work to make a variety of dishes, especially when multiple people lend a helping hand. Banchan always tastes better when there’s enough to share with others.
After my sister and I went away to school, however, my mom began to make fewer and fewer banchan dishes. Filling a table with ten kinds of banchan for just two people doesn’t seem to justify the pile of dirty dishes that will follow. When living alone on school breaks, I also couldn’t justify making mountains of banchan just for myself.
Now that I’m back home from school, I’ve been reminding my mom to make more banchan dishes with me. Most families have their own set of standard banchan and flavor profiles that make up their food. As I learn to cook and live on my own after college, I hope to learn my family’s banchan style and carry it with me. But I know that even if I do not master all the banchan dishes, the wide variety of recipes aren’t meant to be mastered by a single person anyway. With Korean eating, every meal is like a potluck, and I expect colorful tables filled with banchan made by my mother, myself, my sister, and other family members for the years to come.