Foods for Ancestral Rites

Jesa (제사) is the Korean ancestral rite, in which descendants offer food and drink to the spirits of their forebears. Its best-known forms are gijesa, held on the anniversary of a death, and charye (차례), the simpler rite held on holidays, above all on Seollal (Lunar New Year) and Chuseok (the autumn harvest festival). The food prepared for these rites, called jesu or jemul, forms one of the most recognizable bodies of Korean cooking, and much of it is banchan.

Confucian roots

Ancestral rites were systematized in Joseon Korea under Neo-Confucian influence. The key model was Zhu Xi's Family Rituals (Jujagarye in Korean), supplemented by Korean manuals such as Yi I's Jeuicho and the later Saryepyeollam. Zhu Xi's text specifies a set of roughly two dozen offerings: fruits, vegetables, dried meat, fermented relishes, fish and meat, rice cake, rice, soup, skewers, and wine and vinegar.

How the table is laid out

The table is usually arranged in four or five rows facing the spirit tablet or photograph, which marks the north. Left and right are reckoned from the ancestor's point of view, not the living. From the tablet outward, a typical pattern runs as follows:

• First row: wine cups, spoon and chopsticks, rice and soup.
• Second row: noodles, rice cake, skewered and grilled dishes (jeok), and fish.
• Third row: soups and broths (tang) of vegetables, meat or seafood.
• Fourth row: dried meat or fish (po), cooked vegetables (namul), and sweet rice drink or salted relishes.
• Fifth row: fruit and sweets.

At charye the staples change with the holiday. On Seollal, rice-cake soup (tteokguk) replaces the bowl of rice and soup; at Chuseok, songpyeon made with the new harvest's rice takes their place.

The famous rules, and their limits

Many families learn the table through four-character mnemonics: hongdong baekseo (red fruits east, white fruits west), jo-yul-i-si (jujubes, chestnuts, pears, persimmons, in that order), eodong yukseo (fish east, meat west) and jwapo uhye (dried meat on the left, sweet rice drink on the right). These are widely repeated, but scholars note that they have no explicit basis in the classical ritual texts. In September 2022, Sungkyunkwan's ritual standardization committee said as much, stating that the order and placement of dishes matter far less than sincerity, that jeon need not be fried for the table, and proposing a simplified charye table of songpyeon, namul, a grilled dish, kimchi, fruit and wine, with other items added at a family's discretion.

Samsaek namul

The vegetable dish most associated with ancestral rites is samsaek namul (삼색나물), three-colored namul served together. The usual trio is white doraji namul (bellflower root), brown gosari namul (bracken) and green sigeumchi namul (spinach). A popular explanation reads the three as generations: the root for ancestors, the stem for the living and the leaf for descendants. Families substitute freely, using radish for the white or other greens for the green; bean sprout namul is another common white choice.

Customs of avoidance

Certain foods are traditionally kept off the table. Peaches and red beans are avoided because they are believed to repel spirits, which would defeat the purpose of the rite. Fish whose names end in -chi, such as hairtail (galchi) and mackerel pike (kkongchi), have customarily been treated as too lowly. Ritual dishes are also commonly seasoned without chili powder and with little or no garlic, so namul and jeon for the table taste milder than everyday versions.

Regional and family variation

Korean sayings acknowledge that every household does things its own way, and ritual tables bear this out. Gyeongsang households, for example, have distinctive ways of stacking the skewered meats; coastal families offer more fish and seafood; the kinds of jeon, rice cake and fruit shift with local produce. After the rite the food is shared among the family, so the ritual table becomes the holiday meal, and its namul often end up mixed into a bowl of rice.