Songpyeon harvest festival rice cakes

There’s a rice cake for every occasion. Rice cakes help celebrate events, improve health, bring good luck, and scare away evil spirits. In fact, there’s not much a rice cake can’t do, really.

Take New Year. It’s tradition to start off the New Year (Seollal) eating tteok-guk, rice cake soup for breakfast. But if you don’t eat the rice cake soup, the saying goes that you won’t get another year older…

Then in the spring there are rice cakes made with seasonal flowers for picnic baskets at cherry viewing season. There are rice cakes to celebrate Buddha’s birthday, mugwort rice cakes to chase away bad spirits, red bean porridge with rice cakes served cold in the summer and hot in the winter for health and energy.

Rice cakes are given as good luck gifts during the exam season. This is because rice cakes are sticky and in Korean the expression to pass an exam (시험에 붙다) literally means ‘stick to the exam’.

And then there’s Chuseok, harvest festival. And the rice cake for Chuseok is the songpyeon.

Song means pine (松) and the rice cakes are steamed with pine needles. They should be made with this year’s new rice, especially for thanksgiving and are filled with soybeans, sesame seeds or crushed chestnuts filling.

In the past, it was said that a single lady with exquisite songpyeon rice cake shaping skills would find a good husband. So ladies spent a lot of time before Chuseok practising the art. If you are looking for a good husband, here’s what you do:

First, take a small handful of the batch of rice cake dough that you made earlier in the consistency of soft plasticine. Then press it out round and flat in the palm of your hand. Put a spoonful of filling in the middle of the dough. Fold it over and seal the filling inside. You should now have a half-moon 🌙 rice cake.

The key is not to put too much filling in there.

These days it’s getting more popular to just buy the rice cakes before Chuseok. Making them is a bit of a palaver after all. The rice cakes at the market stalls will be selling like hot cakes at this time of year. So you have to order them or get there early before they run out. My mother-in-law has started buying songpyeon too. But she used to make them.

She prepared the dough before we arrived and then we’d all sit around in front of the TV on Chuseok Eve making rice cakes until all the dough was used up and there was a large plate of assorted rice cakes ready to be steamed. Some of them were dainty half moon shapes. Other humungous nondescript blobs with crushed chestnut powder leaking out of all crevices. Can you guess which rice cakes were mine?

Songpyeon are then piled up in a large pan, covered with pine needles and steamed. The pine needles give added aroma and keep the rice cakes from sticking together too.

Once they are steamed you have to pick all the pine needles off the rice cakes but once you do that they start sticking to everything – they stick to each other, they stick to your hands, they stick to stray pine needles or the plate …

But I learned the secret to stopping the rice cakes sticking together – cover them in a few drops of sesame oil. The sesame oil adds a nutty flavour and prevents you ending up with one ginormous multi-coloured rice cake! Happy Chuseok!

Read more about chuseok and the food for the memorial service table here.

There are loads of idioms with rice cakes. Read more about Korean rice cake idioms