Jesa and Charye, the Ancestral Rite Table

Jesa (제사) is the rite of food offered to the ancestors, and charye (차례) is its seasonal form, held on the morning of Seollal and of Chuseok. Both rest on the Confucian ordering of the family that the Joseon court adopted as state doctrine from the late fourteenth century and that spread from the yangban households to the whole of the peninsula over the following centuries. The ritual manuals of that period fixed the offering as a table laid for the dead, and the household cook has carried that table forward in the kitchen ever since.

A jesa is held on the anniversary of an ancestor's death, traditionally after nightfall on the eve of the day, and is kept for the parents, grandparents and further forebears of the senior line. The charye is held in the morning of the two great festivals and is addressed to the ancestors collectively. The food is cooked at home, and it is set out on a low table before a screen or a paper tablet, in a fixed arrangement that the household learns from its elders rather than from a page. The arrangement follows a few principles that are widely observed, though families differ in their details. Rice and soup are placed nearest the officiant, with the rice to the left and the soup to the right as in the living bapsang, and a spoon is set in the rice. Meat, fish and vegetable dishes stand in rows behind them, and fruit and sweets are set at the far side. Sayings on the placing of red fruit to the east and white to the west, and of fish with the head to the east, are repeated in many households, and they are customs of the family rather than rules of the cooking. The cooking is plain by intention. Maangchi's account of the festival tables gives the usual components: jeon, pan-fried in egg batter, in the form of fish fillet, tofu, and vegetables; namul of bracken, bellflower root and spinach; a clear soup; grilled or steamed fish; and tteok, the rice cake, with fruit, dried persimmon and chestnut. The seasonings are kept restrained, and the household has traditionally left out gochugaru and heavy garlic from the offering, so that the red of the chilli does not stand on the table. Dishes are cooked through and served at the temperature of the room. The rite itself proceeds in order: the offering of wine, the bows of the family in the sequence of seniority, and the removal of the food. The meal is then shared among the living, and this sharing, called eumbok, is the part the household values most, since the food of the ancestors is eaten by their descendants as a blessing. The labour of the women of the house, long in the kitchen before dawn, has sustained the practice, and in recent decades smaller families, working lives and Christian households have shortened it, reduced the number of dishes or set it aside. In the diaspora the table is adapted to what can be bought and to what one household can manage, and the structure of rice, soup, jeon and fruit remains recognisable. The rite is where the Korean cook learns that a dish can be a form of address, and why the most ordinary preparations are made with the greatest care.

The offering table is deliberately mild: clear soup, egg-battered jeon, lightly seasoned namul, steamed fish and rice cake, with no chilli and little garlic. The flavours are clean and gentle, built on sesame oil, salt and the sweetness of chestnut, jujube and persimmon, and the dishes are eaten after the rite at room temperature.