Tteokguk (Rice Cake Soup)

Tteokguk is the New Year's food of Korea. No one knows when the custom began, but nineteenth-century almanacs of seasonal customs, Dongguk sesigi and Yeoryang sesigi, describe it as indispensable for the New Year ancestral rite (charye) and for feeding guests on Seollal. Dongguk sesigi calls it baektang (white soup) or byeongtang (rice-cake soup), and because people asked one another how many bowls they had eaten as a way of asking someone's age, it was also nicknamed cheomsebyeong, "the rice cake that adds a year."

The historian Choe Nam-seon proposed that the custom was very old, a holdover from food shared at ancient New Year rites; the clean white rice cake suited a day meant to begin in purity. Before rice-cake machines, steamed rice was pounded with mallets and rolled by hand into long garae-tteok, then sliced on the diagonal once it had firmed.

The broth has changed with the times. The Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture notes that pheasant was the prized base — tied to falconry learned from the Yuan in the late Goryeo period — with chicken as the everyday substitute; beef became the norm only once it was easy to get.

• A filling one-bowl meal: the rice cake supplies carbohydrate for energy, and the beef and egg add protein.
• Beef broth and egg contribute vitamin B12; the MFDS analysis of tteokguk puts a bowl at about 1 µg.
• On the New Year table it is traditionally eaten with banchan such as kimchi and jeon, which round out the vegetables.

• Gaeseong jorangi-tteokguk: thin rice-cake ropes are cut short and pinched in the middle into little cocoon shapes.
• Chungcheong saeng-tteokguk: rice flour is kneaded with hot water and dropped straight into the broth, without steaming and pounding first.
• Northern regions: dumpling soup (mandu-guk) is the New Year dish; many families combine the two as tteok-mandu-guk.
• Jeju and southern islands: in places such as Jeju and Geoje, rice rather than tteokguk is traditionally offered at the New Year rite.
• Broth and toppings: beef brisket broth is now standard, garnished with egg ribbons (jidan), seasoned beef and toasted laver; anchovy or chicken broth are common alternatives.