The Chuseok Table

Chuseok (추석) falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, at the full moon of the autumn harvest, and with Seollal, the lunar new year, it is one of the two great family festivals of the Korean year. It rests on an agrarian calendar: the first rice, fruit and grain of the season are offered to the ancestors before they are eaten by the living. The festival is kept in every region, and the families who keep it return to the house of the eldest line, so the table is as much a gathering of kin as a meal.

The Chuseok table has two parts, the table laid for the ancestors and the table at which the family eats. The first is the charye (차례), the seasonal rite held in the morning at home. Rice and soup are set on the near side of the table, with the other dishes arranged in rows across it: fruit toward the ancestors' side, then namul and other vegetables, then fish and meat, with rice cakes in a further row. The older household rules on placement are fixed by custom and differ from family to family, and a cook follows the practice of her own house rather than any single rule. Maangchi, in her Big Book of Korean Cooking, treats the festival dishes as ordinary home cooking made with more care and in greater quantity, and that is the right way to understand them. The food of the day is defined by songpyeon (송편), the half-moon rice cakes made of rice flour dough and filled with sesame, chestnut or sweetened beans, then steamed over a bed of pine needles. The needles scent the cakes and keep them from sticking, and shaping them by hand is work shared among the women and children of the house, often the evening before. Alongside them come jeon, the egg-battered and pan-fried fish, meat and vegetables; japchae of glass noodles; braised short rib, galbijjim; and several namul, among them bracken, bellflower root and spinach. Fresh fruit, notably pears, persimmons and jujubes, closes the offering, since the festival marks the ripening of the year. After the rite the family eats the same food. The bapsang order of rice, soup and banchan gives way to a spread set out together, and the foods offered to the ancestors are shared round, a custom called eumbok, the receiving of blessing through the food. Rice wine, made from the new harvest and poured first for the eldest, accompanies the meal, and the rules of the drinking table, in which a younger person pours with two hands and turns the head aside to drink in front of an elder, are observed at the family table as they are elsewhere. The festival was also marked by the visit to the family grave, seongmyo, where relatives clear the weeds and make a short offering. Since the division of the peninsula in 1945 and the war of 1950 to 1953, many families have been unable to visit graves or relatives in the North, and for them the day carries a sorrow that the festive table does not remove. Today large numbers of families travel across the country in the days around the full moon, and the cooking, once the work of many hands in a single house, is in many homes reduced, with some dishes bought ready-made. The structure of the table remains clear: the first of the harvest given to the dead, then eaten together by the living.

The flavour of the Chuseok table is gentle and clean rather than sharp. Songpyeon is mildly sweet, its rice dough faintly resinous from the pine needles, with the nutty richness of sesame, the soft sweetness of chestnut or the earthier sweetness of beans within. Jeon is savoury and soft, carrying the taste of egg and the pan, and is usually dipped in a light soy and vinegar sauce. Japchae brings sesame oil and soy to chewy glass noodles, galbijjim is deep, glossy and lightly sweet with soy, and the namul of bracken, bellflower root and spinach add a bitter, earthy and green note beside them. Chilli is used sparingly in the offered dishes, so that the table reads as mild and rounded, and the pears, persimmons and jujubes end it with a cool, clear sweetness against the richer foods. The rice wine, softly sweet and round, accompanies the whole meal.