What is Tteokguk?

Tteokguk, tteok meaning rice cake and guk meaning soup in Korean, is a traditional Korean rice cake soup dish. It’s a custom to serve tteokguk on Korean (Lunar) New Year Day, but it’s a popular dish that is available throughout the year in a lot of Korean restaurants.

The restaurant version usually has more popular add-ons such as mandu. Tteokguk is not one of the most popular dishes for non-Koreans, but I’ve found it’s pretty often requested by non-Koreans who even don’t like rice cake that much.

The dish is made of a tasty beef stock with slices of tteok (rice cake), thin strips of cooked eggs, ground tofu, ground beef, and dried seaweed for seasoning.

Meaning of tteokguk on seollal in Korea

Having tteokguk on seollal is specially meaningful in a couple of aspects: first, family wants to wish the best luck and health for the forthcoming year with the food made of rice - the most significant food in Korea - and second, they celebrate that they get one year older.

In Korea, a baby becomes one year old when they are born. And he or she gets one year older when a new year starts - yes, I feel bad for the babies who are born on December 31. Maybe Koreans want to count in the nine or ten months when the baby must stay in their mom’s womb. Why would you ignore those long days?

Maybe it’s because Koreans tend to increase counting upon its beginning point rather than its ending point. When you run a track, you start to count when you start, not when you finish the first loop. Maybe Koreans want to simplify when they calculate ages. They do calculate the exact age on official documents, but generally, Koreans round up based on how many years calculated from their birth year.

Anyhow, Koreans have interestingly combined eating tteokguk and getting a year older - if you don’t eat tteokguk on the new year’s day, you don’t grow a year. I assume that many Koreans, many elder Koreans, would stop eating tteokguk if aging were such a simple matter, but sadly I believe the tradition started because they didn’t have enough food back then, especially in winter and they didn’t want their kids to have more than one serving.

My Mom’s Tteokguk

To me, tteokguk on seollal means not only about the dish itself, but about the whole preparation that my family shared. I’m pretty sure many Koreans have this kind of remembrance.

These days Koreans can easily get ready-to-go tteokguk tteok from any local groceries. They put tteock in water for a few hours to soften them before we cook, but that’s it. No additional preparation is needed. How convenient!

It takes at least three or four long steps for my mom to make the best tteokguk for seollal. First, she buys the best kind of rice, washes it and brings it to a rice-mill. It’s usually very crowded during the holidays, so my mom waits for it to be done for a couple of hours at least.

Then, mom comes back with these steamy long thin rounded rice cakes - garae tteok .

- Garae Tteok

We all taste the steamy warm garea tteok at least half of a piece. Honestly, it doesn’t have a lot of taste. It’s not sweet or anything. But somehow I never want to miss tasting the fresh garae tteok. It must be because garae tteok is so fresh and warm, and it’s the traditional food for seollal. All of my family love it.

After enjoying its bland taste, we all separate them - they can be very sticky - and put one by one on a flat area. It takes a good couple of days for them to fully dry. I mean, it should turn hard, not only dry.

When they are hard, we all get together and start to slice them up. It’s a sort of tedious and tiring job, but we all enjoy it. We take the turns because we usually have only a couple of knives and cutting boards. We watch TV shows about seollal or just talk about this and that while cutting them.

It’s just a lot of fun. And mom’s tteokguk is so delicious. Someday, I can make such tteockguk!

This year, I had tteokguk in a small restaurant “Green House” in the valley with my husband. I certainly don’t miss growing one year older, but I miss being in Korea with my Korean family during the seollal holiday.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 under Korean Food.