What are the dishes on the Chuseok Thanksgiving table?
(updated 2021) It’s the season where daughters-in-law around the country take a deep sigh (not me of course…). Because it’s time to visit the in-laws and start cooking and washing up. Preparing the Chuseok Thanksgiving Table takes a lot of work. So every year, more and more people are choosing not to bother and to just go away on holiday instead. Or at least cut down on the work.
As the years have gone by, my mother-in-law has also simplified our Chuseok menu. We used to spend a day preparing food – from frying savoury pancakes to shaping the songpyeon rice cakes with a chestnut filling. Now we buy the rice cakes ready-made. And we are down to the bare essential dishes on the table too. These vary from family to family. But here is our Essential Chuseok Thanksgiving Table.
Essentials on the Chuseok Thanksgiving Table
The Signature Dish of Chuseok: SONGPYEON rice cakes
We have to start with the absolutely ESSENTIAL dish of Chuseok. And of course it is a rice cake. There is a rice cake for every event. And THE rice cake for chuseok is songpyeon (송편).
My mother-in-law used to make the rice cakes and the fillings herself. But over the last few years she has started to buy them. Often they come in several colours – pink, green, white, and purple – but they can also be simply white.
Song-pyeon are steamed with pine needles – (song means pine). And stuffed with chestnuts or sweet with honey or red beans. They are covered in a drizzle of sesame oil which stops them sticking together and adds a nutty flavour to the aroma of pine and legume or nut filling.
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savoury pancakes: Jeon (전)
It wouldn’t be Chuseok without some fried pancakes.
Stalls at the local markets do a roaring trade selling jeon at this time of year. Popular stall keepers who might sell 1 million won’s worth of jeon on an average day, can make more than 10 million won during Chuseok! I bet they do even better now during the pandemic when nobody can go abroad!
We make three kinds of pancakes: courgette, pollack fish, and sweet potato. On the day before Chuseok, my main job is Chief Pancake Frier. My mother-in-law has already sliced the courgettes and covered them in flour. So they are ready to go. I dunk them in a bowl of whisked eggs and fry them in a huge pan.
Admittedly, this is not an overly complicated job. But it is still very important! 🤓
The key to successful jeon is in the flipping. And the flipping manoeuvre has to be carried out with long chopsticks. (it just does, ok?) So chopstick skills are required. Timing is critical too. You must not leave the jeon too long. Nobody wants to see a plate of charred jeon on the Chuseok Thanksgiving Table. So my mother-in-law will say ‘turn them over‘ ‘turn them over‘ 뒤집어 , 뒤집어 (twei-jip-o). Hence, that was one of the first expressions I learned in Korean!
Next, it’s the turn of thin slices of white pollack fish. Flour, dunk, fry, flip.
Then slices of sweet potato go into a flour and water mix (not egg) ready for frying. Finally, we fry croaker fish. And sometimes slices of tofu.
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Namul: seasoned vegetables
Namul, seasoned vegetables, are another essential element on the Chuseok Thanksgiving Table. And there must be THREE namul dishes with different colours – brown, yellow, and green:
bracken 고사리 (kosari) , bell flower 도라지 (toraji) , and spinach 시금치 (shigumchi) .
Out of the three, spinach is the only one that I had heard of. But I had never eaten it like this before. It’s blanched and seasoned with salt, crushed garlic, and sesame oil. Delicious.
Bracken grows wild in the woods in England. But I had no idea it was edible. The young shoots of bracken are picked and dried and have to be soaked for a while before being cooked. And bell flower? I had never heard of it. It’s a slightly bitter and crunchy root vegetable that needs to be cooked for a while to soften it. All three dishes are seasoned with salt, garlic, and sesame oil.
There are rules for the layout of the Chuseok Thanksgiving Table. Dishes are not put out willy-nilly. No Sir. The layout is the same as Lunar New Year and I wrote about how to lay the dishes on the ceremonial table here.
Fruit
Seasonal fruit is always on the table. We have apples, pears, persimmon, jujube 대추 (taechu) and raw chestnuts 밤 (pam) ALL picked from trees in the garden.
Jujube (aka Korean dates) are fresh in autumn and look like little apples. By Lunar New Year they are dried and and shrivelled and turn a deeper red. Chestnuts are falling off the trees everywhere in the countryside at this time of year. They are quite tough to peel though when they’re raw, so that’s my father-in-law’s job.
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Chei-gi Brass dishes
My mother-in-law used to use the special dishes for memorial services – 제기 (chei-gi) made of brass (or wood as in our case) But this meant that there was a HUGE amount of washing up as those dishes can only be used for the memorial table (차롓상 cha rye sang). So after bowing to the ancestors, all the food has to be plated up again into regular dishes. This means double the washing up.
But these days we just put the food straight into regular dishes…I put a picture up years ago of our Chuseok in Seoul here when we used to use the chei-gi dishes.
Settings for the Ancestors
The Chuseok Thanksgiving table has three sets of chopsticks and spoons with soup and rice, and alcohol for the ancestors. One set for Mr Kim’s paternal grandfather, one for his paternal grandmother, and one for all the other ancestors. I wrote about how to lay the dishes on the ceremonial table here.
The 차례 cha rye memorial service is carried out early on Chuseok morning. I usually get up around 6:30 am but my mother-in-law is up well before that. Once everything is plated up and laid out on the table we carry out the two bows for the ancestors. Then we eat and drink.
We can be done and dusted by 9:30 am and then all that’s left to ask is, “so what do we do now?” (See what happens when you get up too early?)
After the work is done, we might go on a day trip. One time we went to Sokcho (Gangwon Province) which has a beautiful national park and the mountain of Seoraksan. But one thing to remember is that it is holiday time and everyone has the same idea. So be prepared for crowds and traffic jams…
Related posts:
Things to do in autumn in Korea
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