A North Korean website devoted to cooking has appeared on the internet more than two years after it was first reported to have launched.

The website of the Korean Association of Cooks offers hundreds of recipes for "housewives' convenience," an introduction to restaurants in North Korea, and details of the cooking association, including a contact telephone number for enquiries.

North Korea's state media agency KCNA first reported the launch of "Korean Dishes" in March 2012 and again in January of 2013, but both times it wasn’t accessible outside of the country.

It was assumed to be an internal site on the country's Kwangmyong intranet system, a state-run internal internet of carefully chosen websites such as message boards and state media, which is accessible in some libraries and schools.

Raengmyeon (known as Naengmyeon in South Korea), is a traditional Korean dish of cold noodles. The website lists it as a speciality from Pyongyang, which is "good for the human body". It recommends using buckwheat noodles for better "aroma and flavour". Photograph: Korean Dishes Photograph: Korean Dishes

However, this week, a site with the same domain “www.cooks.org.kp” name was discovered to be accessible from outside North Korea, on the internet. The exact date it appeared is unclear, but Doug Madory from Renesys, which specialises in internet performance monitoring, said the domain name for the site appeared as far back as 8 May this year. The HTML code for the page carries a date of May 2013.

According to the 2012 KCNA report, the "homepage deals with common knowledge and theories on variety of dishes and how to cook them".

"It also offers such data as origins and anecdotes about dishes and global trend in cooking development. It has a distinctive catalogue for serving housewives’ convenience,” which includes staple Korean dishes such as kimchi.

Yakbap is a sweet traditional dish made from steamed glutinous rice, honey, chestnuts, dates and more. The website describes it as a "medicinal food" for "rejuvenation" eaten at New Year festivities. Photograph: Korean Dishes Photograph: Korean Dishes

“When a visitor chooses any food material in the catalogue, she can get detailed information about lists of dishes prepared with it and their cookery. The homepage contains multimedia on national and foreign dishes. Through homepage visitors can exchange their knowledge and views with each other and acquire a wide-ranging cooking,” the report says.



The website features dishes that use expensive ingredients such as meat and fish, which – in a country where an estimated 80% of households lack essential elements for a healthy diet and millions of children are believed to be at risk of malnutrition – are unattainable for the majority of people. Most North Koreans do not have computers, and are also unable to access the intranet, which is limited to the better-equipped schools and libraries.

Despite this, An Song-il, an official at the Sojae Cooking Information Exchange Company, said the website has proved very popular within North Korea, according to the 2013 KCNA report.

Gwibalyisul, a type of wine, is listed on the website as a drink to enjoy at New Year, to ensure the drinker only hears good news. The website recommends "one cup cold" and warns that excessive consumption can be "harmful to health". Photograph: Korean Dishes Photograph: Korean Dishes

"The number of website visitors is on a steady increase, most of them being housewives," he said.



The report says the website offers "information and multimedia about Korean and foreign cuisines kitchen utensils and nearly 8,000 cooking methods."

It quoted Kim Un-sim, a technician at the Hwanghae Iron and Steel Complex, as saying: "I had needed to read cookbooks when I had to make a special dish. But I can easily get cooking information through the website and learn a lot of cooking techniques."



Several North Korean restaurants are listed on the website, including Okryugwan, which opened in Pyongyang in 1960 and has become a culinary institution in the country. Raengmyeon is one of its signature dishes.

The banquet hall at Okryugwan restaurant in Pyongyang, founded on the orders of the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung in 1960. Photograph: Korean Dishes Photograph: Korean Dishes

Okryugwan restaurants have sprung up across the world, perhaps most famously in Dubai, and are a vital source of foreign currency for North Korea.



A version of this article first appeared on North Korea Tech