The ancestors of the Korean people appear to have been nomads from Central Asia who gradually migrated eastwards to settle in Northeast Asia and the Korean peninsula. In China they became known as the Eastern Barbarians of Maek. It is probably because they were nomads that they enjoyed a diet centering on the meat of their livestock.
The favorite dish of the Maek people was maekjeok, a kind of kebab made by skewering beef or other meat and roasting it over a fire. This is thought to have been the predecessor of Korea’s popular dish, bulgogi. Though there is some regional variation, the Han people who make up the majority of the Chinese population generally add spices to their meat only after roasting or boiling it, while jeok is made by seasoning the meat before cooking, as is bulgogi and this is why the two are thought to be related.
However, the Silla and Baekje Kingdoms that flourished on the Korean peninsula over 1,000 years ago embraced Buddhism as their national religion and over the centuries while they held sway, meat-eating was banned and the tradition of maekjeok was lost. The ensuing Goryeo Dynasty was also Buddhist, but with the invasion of the nomadic Mongols, the custom of eating meat was revived, and with it perhaps the food of the ancient Koreans, maekjeok. Once the bond had been forged with the Mongols, maekjeok reappeared in the capital, Gaeseong, under the name seolhamyeok, and this developed into today’s neobiani.
Neobiani is a style of cooking in which the meat is cut into steaks and marinated in a sauce, then roasted on a hot iron plate. It has the disadvantage that the cooked meat must be carved again before serving and that while being transferred to the table, the meat is liable to cool down and lose some of its flavor. Later on, it became possible to cook and eat the meat on the spot by using special utensils in which the flame was applied to the meat through the holes in a grill, and this became the standard way of cooking what is now bulgogi.
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