Seasonal and Festival Foods

The traditional Korean year was measured by the lunar calendar and by the work of the fields, and each turning point had its own food. Korean writers distinguish two related ideas. Sisik (시식) is food in season, made from what the season provides. Jeolsik (절식) is food tied to a particular holiday, often with ritual or symbolic meaning. Together they make up what is often called sesi eumsik, seasonal-custom food.

Much of what is known about these customs in the late Joseon period comes from the Dongguk sesigi (동국세시기), a month-by-month record of seasonal customs compiled by Hong Seok-mo in 1849, which covers both court and common practice.

Seollal: rice-cake soup

The first day of the lunar year is marked with tteokguk (떡국), a broth with sliced white rice cake. It replaces rice and soup on the New Year ancestral table, and eating a bowl is traditionally said to add a year to one's age.

Daeboreum: five grains and old greens

The first full moon of the year, on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, has one of the richest food traditions of the calendar.

• Ogokbap (오곡밥): rice cooked with several grains and beans, traditionally five, associated with hopes for the coming harvest.
• Mugeun namul (묵은 나물): "aged greens," vegetables dried the previous year, rehydrated and seasoned; folk belief held that eating them at Daeboreum kept one from suffering in the summer heat. Dried bracken, cooked as gosari namul, is a familiar example.
• Bureom (부럼): nuts such as walnuts, chestnuts and pine nuts cracked with the teeth in the morning, believed to protect against boils and skin troubles for the year.
• Gwibalgi sul (귀밝이술): a cup of cold wine, said to sharpen the hearing.
• Yakbap (약밥): sweet glutinous rice with honey, chestnuts, jujubes and pine nuts.

Spring and early summer

On Samjinnal, the third day of the third month, people made hwajeon, small rice cakes pressed with azalea petals. Spring greens appeared in soups and namul, and mugwort soup was a distinctive taste of the season. Dano, the fifth day of the fifth month, brought rice cakes made with mugwort and other herbs, and cherry punch.

Summer: eating against the heat

Yudu, the fifteenth of the sixth month, had its own rice-cake dishes and cool drinks. The three hottest days of summer, the sambok, are still marked with restorative soups, today most famously samgyetang, a young chicken simmered with ginseng and glutinous rice. Fresh wheat was made into noodles.

Chuseok: songpyeon and the new harvest

On the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, families give thanks for the harvest. The signature food is songpyeon (송편), small half-moon rice cakes filled with sesame, beans or chestnut and steamed on a bed of pine needles, made with rice from the new crop for the ancestral table. Songpyeon was not always tied to Chuseok: older records associate it with Junghwajeol, the first day of the second month, when households gave the cakes to farm workers at the start of the farming season. Taro soup, new chestnuts and jujubes are other autumn foods, and the Chuseok table usually includes three-colored namul and jeon such as zucchini jeon.

Dongji: red bean porridge

The winter solstice, Dongji (동지), was once called ase, a "little New Year." The food of the day is patjuk (팥죽), porridge of red adzuki beans with small glutinous rice balls. Its red color was believed to drive away evil spirits: households offered it to the household gods and sprinkled some at the gate to keep misfortune out. As with tteokguk, eating a bowl of patjuk was said to make one a year older.

Winter: preserving and warming

Late autumn's kimjang filled the jars for winter. Winter tables featured dumplings, cold buckwheat noodles eaten in a warm room, and rich bone broths.

The calendar today

Many of these foods have faded from everyday life, but the major holidays still bring them out. Tteokguk at New Year, Daeboreum nuts and greens, songpyeon at Chuseok and patjuk at the solstice remain widely known, and supermarkets stock pre-soaked grain mixes and dried vegetables for the full-moon table each year.