The Seollal Table

Seollal (설날) is the first day of the lunar new year, reckoned by the lunisolar calendar that Korea kept for its festivals long before the modern solar calendar was adopted. It is among the great family holidays of the Korean year, set beside Chuseok, and it has been marked in the household with an ancestral rite in the morning and a meal for the living afterwards. The table described here is the home table, laid wherever the family gathers, whether in the old family house or in an apartment in Seoul, Los Angeles or Honolulu.

The centre of the Seollal table is a bowl of tteokguk (떡국), a clear soup of sliced rice cake in a broth of beef, or in some households of dried anchovy or chicken. The rice cake is cut from a long white cylinder of steamed, pounded non-glutinous rice, the garaetteok, and is sliced on the diagonal into flat ovals. The broth is seasoned with soy sauce for soup (guk-ganjang) and salt, and the soup is finished with beaten egg cooked into thin sheets and cut into strips, with shredded beef, toasted seaweed and sliced spring onion on top. Maangchi gives the soup in this plain form, and it remains the form against which regional and family variations are measured. The whiteness of the rice cake and the length of the cylinder are customarily read as clean beginning and long life, and by Korean count of age a bowl of tteokguk marks the eater as a year older. Around the soup stands the rest of the holiday meal, built from dishes that keep well and can be made ahead, since the cook is also preparing the rite. Mandu (만두), the filled dumplings, are made in quantity by the family together, with a filling of pork or beef, tofu, kimchi and mung bean sprouts, and are eaten boiled in the soup or steamed on their own. Jeon, the pan-fried slices of fish, tofu, zucchini and meat coated in flour and egg, are cooked in a shallow film of oil and are laid out both on the ritual table and on the family's. Japchae of sweet potato starch noodles, galbijjim of braised short rib, namul of seasoned vegetables and the kimchi put up at the winter's kimjang complete the spread. Each is a dish that is served at room temperature without loss. The order of the day follows the rite. In the morning the family sets out the charye (차례), the ancestral table, with rice and soup, fruit, rice cake, jeon and cups of alcohol, and bows before it in the order of age. Then the younger members make the sebae, the deep formal bow to the elders, who answer with good wishes and, customarily, with a gift of money. Only after the bows is the soup eaten, and the food of the ancestral table is shared among the living. The sequence, rite first, bow second, meal third, is the structure of the day and the reason the dishes are chosen as they are. The Seollal table has also travelled with Korean families abroad. Where the ingredients differ, the form is kept: tteokguk is made from rice cake bought frozen or fresh from a Korean grocer, and the beef broth is simmered in a household that may have no ancestral altar at all. The meal remains a marker of the new year and of family descent wherever it is cooked.

The flavour of the Seollal table is restrained and clean. The tteokguk broth is savoury and faintly sweet from beef, with the soy sauce for soup giving salt without darkening the colour, and the chewy, neutral rice cake absorbs it. Against this plain bowl the table sets richer and sharper things: the sesame and soy sweetness of japchae, the sweet-salty glaze of galbijjim, and the acidity and heat of the well-fermented kimchi.