The bo in bossam is bojagi (褓), a wrapping cloth, so its root sense is "to wrap in a cloth." Yet before it named a food, it named an unsettling custom. In the Joseon era, to ward off the misfortune foretold for a young woman fated to be widowed, men would sometimes seize an outsider by night, bundle him in a cloth, and force him to spend the night with her. There was also the reverse — gwabu-bossam, in which a man would wrap a widow in a cloth and carry her off to marry her. These were customs born of rigid notions of chastity and the pressure on widows to remain unmarried. The food bossam, meanwhile, began with bossam kimchi, made by "wrapping" seasoned kimchi filling inside cabbage leaves, and developed into the dish of boiled pork eaten wrapped up the same way. Whether the custom or the dish, the common thread is the act of "wrapping something up as in a cloth." Because of that uneasy origin, in Kaesong the dish is said to be called ssamkimchi ("wrap kimchi") rather than bossam.