Tuesday, March 19, 2024
FOOD&DRINK

What’s on the Korean Lunar New Year Table?

(updated 2021) Lunar New Year is here again, so it’s time to start frying the savoury pancakes and making dumpling soup! After 15 years, I can (just about 👀) remember all the dishes that we need to make. And just as importantly, the order they have to go on the Korean Lunar New Year table!

In the lead up to New Year when the companies close for the holidays, the subway is usually full of office workers carrying gifts of family pack boxes of spam or shampoo home to their families. Wives get ready to spend time cooking with their in-laws, and children look forward to receiving some sebae-ton (a money gift in an envelope).

But the social distancing rules in Korea in Feb 2021 mean that we can only meet in groups of up to 4 people. So it’s going to be a quieter time for many this year.

Traditionally, it’s an early start on Lunar New Year morning as the ancestral table has to be laid before breakfast. So a lot of the preparation is done the evening before. In the morning, the dishes are set out in rows. We’ve got to have some fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and fried pancakes. And finally there’s the most important mandu (dumpling) soup for the ancestors. I can’t say that this is EXACTLY how the table should look according to the Confucian rules. But this is pretty much how our table is laid out every year.

lunar new year
Fruit

One of my jobs is to plate up the food. Starting with the red jujube dates. At Thanksgiving, the dates are freshly picked from the tree in the garden. They are light green and fresh and taste a bit like unsweet apples. By Lunar New Year, they are a deeper red, dried and wrinkly.

Either way, it’s a particularly tricky task trying to get the jujube dates to stack up into the high pyramid structure. The plates shouldn’t look ‘stingy’. So food should be piled up as high as is realistically possible. But it’s bad form if anything bounces off the plate onto the floor. (We can’t present food that’s been on the floor to the ancestors, even if I wash it again first). You need a very steady hand.

lunar new year

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It’s the same problem with the raw chestnuts that sit next to the jujube. AND they are a nightmare to peel, but luckily that’s not my job!

There should be an odd number of larger, countable foods like apples and whole fish. So I just cut the tops off three apples and three pears and they are ready to go. Next are the plates of semi-dried persimmon, and rice cakes.

vegetables
lunar new year

The row of vegetables ALWAYS includes three kinds of vegetable namul, green, yellow, and brown. First in line is blanched spinach seasoned with salt, garlic and sesame oil. In the middle sits Doraji bellflower, a slightly bitter and crunchy root vegetable. And then there’s brown bracken which has been dried, so has to be soaked before it’s cooked. There’s also some fried tofu, seaweed, and sikhye – a sweet drink with rice and pine nuts. 

meat and fish

When I think of Lunar New Year or Chuseok Thanksgiving, I think of frying savoury (jeon) pancakes. Because frying is a big job at this time of year. These days, we make less food than before, but there’s ALWAYS white fish, courgette, and sweet potato pancakes. And marinated beef, fried croaker fish, and a whole dried pollock.

.lunar new year

Dumpling Soup

And so we come to the star of the show. There are 3 place settings on the table with ddeokguk rice cake soup, rice, and rice wine. The saying goes that you get one year older when you eat a bowl of rice cake soup…

My mother-in-law makes mandu dumplings before Lunar New Year to put in the soup along with the sliced rice cake. The soup is topped with flakes of seaweed and slices of egg omelette.

lunar new year

Once all the food is put out on the table we carry out the ancestral rites (charye) and bow to the ancestors before clearing away the table and sitting down to eat breakfast ourselves with a couple of glasses of rice wine! (Alcohol in the morning! I know!) After breakfast and cleaning up it’s time for a game of Yunnori before a little nap before lunch!

All the best for the Year of the Ox. Let’s hope this year is better than 2020!

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One thought on “What’s on the Korean Lunar New Year Table?

  • I just watched Chefs Table, season 3 ep1 which is about a Buddhist nun named Jeong Kwan, from South Korea…she approaches cooking as a spiritual practice, it was a great episode and you get to learn a lot about Korean food from a different perspective 😉

    Reply

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