Yi Tŏngmu and Women’s Cooking in Late Chosŏn Korea

Abstract This article explores the various perceptions of women’s cooking presented in Yi Tŏngmu’s Minor Propriety for the Scholar (Sasojŏl), along with the diverse genres of writings about cooking prevalent in the late Chosŏn period. While Yi’s manual of conduct primarily aimed to reaffirm the gendered labor of cooking as essential to achieving an ideal familial and social order, it also reflected the period’s revaluation of domestic labor and skills amid shifting cultural and economic landscapes. Yi Tŏngmu’s text illustrates that women’s cooking became crucial to establishing the centrality of the domestic realm in late Chosŏn Korea, where the previously unacknowledged significance of the symbolic, cultural, and material efficacy of women’s work reshaped the relationships between morality and skill, reproductive labor and productive work, and textual knowledge and embodied practice.