A Thousand-Year History of Yakgwa

To understand yakgwa, you have to look back about a thousand years. The earliest references appear in Goryeo dynasty records (918–1392), where the cookie was served at Buddhist temples and royal courts. It was, in the most literal sense, a luxury — wheat was imported, honey was rare, and sesame oil was reserved for special occasions. The combination of all three in a single small piece of food meant that yakgwa carried, even in its earliest form, an unmistakable signal of care and resource.

What follows is a short and necessarily incomplete history. Whole books have been written on each century touched here. The goal is not to be exhaustive but to give a sense of the long, quiet line that yakgwa has walked — through dynasties, austerity periods, industrial decline, and finally, in the last few years, into a kind of renaissance.

From Temples to Tables

During Goryeo, yakgwa was so closely associated with Buddhism that the state occasionally banned it during austerity periods. The reasoning was practical as much as ideological — the cookie required ingredients that were scarce enough to be considered indulgent in lean years. Even then, the cookie persisted, finding a quieter life in monasteries and aristocratic homes. Records suggest that even during bans, the temples kept making yakgwa for ceremonial use, just in smaller quantities.

By the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897), yakgwa had migrated into ancestral rites and Chuseok tables, becoming a fixture of family memory. The court formalized the shapes and decorations — chrysanthemum patterns, lotus stamps, ridged edges — and these visual conventions still echo in the cookie's modern form. A 17th-century court cookbook lists no fewer than nine yakgwa variations, each linked to a specific occasion or recipient.

The word itself — 약과 (藥菓) — translates to "medicine cookie." The "medicine" refers not to a pharmaceutical use but to the belief that the ingredients — honey, sesame oil, wheat — were tonic, restorative, and worthy of careful preparation. In a sense, the name itself enshrines the cookie's seriousness; this was never a casual food.

The Industrial Era

The 20th century was not kind to yakgwa. Industrialization reached Korean confectionery in the 1960s, and yakgwa was one of the foods that suffered most under mass production. The honey was replaced with cheaper syrups. The sesame oil was diluted with canola. The two-day soak became a 20-minute soak. By the 1980s, the average supermarket yakgwa bore little resemblance to its Joseon ancestor — same shape, same name, almost nothing else in common.

The category became associated, fairly or not, with disappointment. Children of that era remember yakgwa as the cookie that looked beautiful in the gift tin and disappointed on the tongue. That association lingered for a generation and is part of the reason today's renaissance feels so dramatic — most consumers in their 30s and 40s are not rediscovering yakgwa; they are discovering it for the first time, properly made.

The Long Quiet Period

• 1960s–1990s: industrial mass production, quality declines, association with Chuseok-only consumption
• 2000s: yakgwa is mostly bought during Chuseok, seen as "old"; specialty makers begin quietly preserving traditional techniques
• 2010s: a few small workshops begin restoring traditional methods; the first artisanal yakgwa shops open in Seoul
• Early 2020s: cafés begin featuring yakgwa-glazed pastries; Gen-Z social media discovery accelerates
• Mid-2020s: full reinvention, café reinterpretation, premium gifting demand, global export

The Renaissance and Its Risks

The renaissance carries its own risks. Every viral moment in food brings imitators who chase the form without the substance. Already, "yakgwa-flavored" products with no actual yakgwa in them have begun appearing on convenience store shelves — yakgwa lattes, yakgwa ice cream, yakgwa cereal — many of which use a synthetic flavoring rather than real cookie pieces. This is the predictable cost of attention.

The harder, more important question is whether the renaissance produces lasting cultural literacy or simply a peak followed by a forgetting. Our hope is that this generation's exposure to well-made yakgwa builds a kind of muscle memory that survives the trend cycle, so that even when the cafés move on, a basic standard of expectation remains in the culture.

Where Sweetnya Stands

Sweetnya stands at the end of that long quiet period. We are not the first to make yakgwa, and we will not be the last. We simply hope to be one of the makers who passes it forward in good condition. The thousand-year line has been carried by countless anonymous hands — temple cooks, court chefs, village grandmothers, small-batch makers in Andong and Jeonju who never let the technique go even when no one was buying. Our small contribution is to keep that line unbroken for one more generation, in a form that the next generation will recognize and want to inherit.