gochu

Gochu (고추) is the Korean word for chili pepper, the fruit of Capsicum annuum, and its etymology is contested among three theories. One derives it from the Sino-Korean compound go (苦, bitter) and chu (椒, pepper or spice); a second holds that it entered Korean as a phonetic loan through Japanese, which called the pepper togarashi; a third treats it as an independent Korean formation applied to the new plant by analogy with older spice words. The 1613 herbal compendium Dongui Bogam, written by royal physician Heo Jun, records the plant as waegatsu, meaning Japanese mustard, showing that early 17th-century Koreans understood capsicum as a foreign import.

The plant that gochu names arrived in the Korean peninsula during the Japanese invasions of 1592 to 1598, known in Korean as the Imjin War. Japanese forces are credited in Korean chronicles with bringing pepper seeds. Adoption was fast: by 1715, Yi Sugwang's encyclopedia Jibong Yuseol described gochu as growing throughout the country. Within fifty years of its arrival, Korean cooks had begun applying dried chili to fermented vegetables, replacing older spices such as sancho (산초, Chinese pepper) and mustard. The speed of adoption suggests the pepper filled an existing culinary demand for pungent heat.

The transformation gochu triggered in Korean cuisine was structural, not merely additive. Before capsicum, kimchi was white or pale, relying on salt, garlic, and ginger alone; after gochu, red became the visual signature of Korean fermented foods. The paste form, gochujang (고추장), is documented in the royal court cookbook Eumsik dimibang around 1670. The powdered form, gochugaru (고추가루), appears in household recipe collections of the 18th century. Both derived compounds carry gochu as their prefix, anchoring the pepper at the center of the Korean flavor vocabulary.

In contemporary South Korea, gochu is both a taxonomic category and a commercial classification covering over thirty named cultivars. The mild Cheongyang green gochu is eaten raw with doenjang as a snack; the Cheongyang chili variety reaches up to 10,000 Scoville units and is used in soups and stews. The word entered English-language food writing through the spread of Korean cuisine in the 1990s and 2000s and now appears untranslated in ingredient lists in mainstream American food publications, having passed the threshold at which editors no longer require a parenthetical gloss.