Korean Rice Cake Metaphors

Korean rice cakes is one of Korean traditional food. Like many other countries, Korea has various kinds of traditional food. Among them, one that is always on the table is rice cakes (ddeok). Korean rice cakes is made from rice or cereal flour and is either steamed or boiled. It is prepared for all occasions whether happy or sad, for Korean birthdays, festive days, or funerals.

Korean rice cakes (fancy)

Korean birthday cake (baekseolgi)

Starting with baegil (a feast for a baby’s 100th day) followed bu dol (the first birthday), and every birthday thereafter, Koreans always prepare ddeok for birthdays and the most meaningful is baekseolgi (white rice cake) made of white rice flour. The white color of baekseolgi has the symbolic meaning of purity and wishes for the child to grow in purity and honesty.

Special rice cakes (ddeok) for special days

Korean rice cakes have long been an essential part of ritual ceremonies such as weddings and ancestor’s worship, a memorial service held on the anniversary of one’s ancestor’s death. In Korea, special rice cakes commemorate special days.

A table is set with rice cakes as an offering for ancestor memorial services on two other special Korean festival occasions — Ddeok soup (tteok guk is prepared on the lunar New Year’s Day (Seollal) and songpyeon on Full-moon’s Day (Chuseok, August 15th by the lunar calendar. After the ceremonies, ddeok is shared by families. It has been a custom to share ddeok with neighbors when they move or begin a new business.

Ddeok metaphor in Korean proverbs

The word, ddeok is easily found in Korean expressions, taking on as many different meanings as there are kinds of ddeok.

• When something is very easy to do, you say 누워서 떡먹기, which literally means “That’s as easy as eating rice cake while lying down”, meaning the same as “It’s a piece of cake”.

• 그림의 떡 is “You can see it, but you can’t eat it”, meaning “pie in the sky”.

Some proverbs hint at ill-hearted people in the world:

• 떡 주고 뺨 맞는 다 - "You give him a rice cake but he slaps your cheek in return."

• 떡 덜러는데 돌 준다 - "You ask for a rice cake but are given a stone."

Though ddeok has less impact in contemporary Korea than in days of old, ddeok still is buried as a metaphor in the Korean language.

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The above information is taken from the article Korean Rice Cake.

Making Ddeok

Ddeok, Koreans’ favorite traditional food for special occasions

The Ddeok Museum:

Located in the district of Jongno in Seoul, the Ddeok Museum exhibits unique items that show customs of Korea, such as ddeok (Korean rice cake), utensils for making ddeok, and traditional kitchen utensils that are now hardly found even in the countryside of Korea. The museum runs several programs of making traditional Korean food, including ddeok, to enhance the understand of Korean culture.

Ddeok (rice cake) means more than just a cake of rice to Koreans. It is a symbol to remember and celebrate special days of one’s life. 

• On New Year’s Day, Koreans make ddeokguk (soup with thin slices of rice cake) as they believe they become a year older by eating the dish. 

ddeokguk - "birthday soup"
Also "New Year soup", as the ddeok is sticky
and therefore symbolizes luck "sticking" with you in the New Year.

• To celebrate the 100th day after birth of a baby, baekseolgi (snow white rice cake), which symbolizes holiness, is placed on the table setting for the ceremony. 

• On a baby’s 1st birthday, parents usually put susugyeongdan (millet balls rolled in red beans) on the table on the day of celebration. This is based on the traditional belief that the red color of red beans prevents misfortune, and these rice cakes are shared with one’s relatives or neighbors.

Beginning from the 100th day after the birth of a baby, ddeok is used to celebrate important milestones of one’s life: 

• birthdays including hwangap (the 60th birthday)

• weddings

• coming-of-age

• commemorative rites for the deceased

Ddeok is both a good meal replacement and a snack as it is made with rice, and each pieces is beautifully shaped. The history of ddeok in Korea is long and diverse: Koreans first began making ddeok back in the era of the Three Kingdoms (the 4th - 7th century) of Korea, and there are more than 200 kinds of ddeok.

However, with the introduction of the Western culture in the modern era, ddeok lost its popularity to bread and confectionery of the West. Many Koreans are now more familiar with bread than with ddeok, and they eat ddeok only for the holidays. Instead of making ddeok at home, they usually purchase it for ancestral rites. The Ddeok Museum, located on the 2nd and 3rd floors of the Institute of Traditional Korean Food building, is a private museum dedicated to preserving the tradition of ddeok. Various antiques, such as cooking utensils used to make ddeok and traditional kitchen utensils that used to be owned by the director of the museum are currently exhibited in the museum. The elderly Koreans are often filled with nostalgia when they see the relics displayed in the museum.

On the 2nd floor of the museum, mockups of beautifully shaped ddeok are exhibited by type, season and ingredient. The exhibition hall shows traditional tools used for making ddeok at home, such as the pouring board, the rice-cake mallet, and the large mortar, as well as antique households and mockups related to kimchi. On the 3rd floor, table-settings for various rites of passage from birth to the death of a person and 40 kinds of ingredients of ddeok are exhibited.

In addition to seeing the exhibitions, visitors can wear hanbok (traditional Korean costumes) and make Korean traditional food like osaek-songpyeon (five-colored half-moon rice cake), dasik (Korean tea confectionary), bulgogi (Korean barbecue), and kimchi.

Food explains its country best. Food experience in the Ddeok Museum will give visitors a special opportunity to understand Korea better.

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Information found in the e-book “A guide to Touring Industrial Destinations of Korea”

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Back in late December 2011 in Hoegi-dong, near Cheongryangni, I passed a "modern" method of making rice. Well, compared to the present-day's modern method of using rice powder and large machinery to hydrate and make the powder into soft and chewy "cake" in a self-contained production room, this was pretty old-style. In the kiosk beans were actually being ground to make the bean-cake, much like rice could be ground. The tiny shop had two machines working and baskets and baskets of ground beans ready for grinding further into cakes. Was really fascinating to see! And because the food was freshly ground, the taste was very alive. Unfortunately, shortly after I took these pictures, the shop was replaced by another. Too bad. It's a great loss to older culture to see those more traditional styles of food production disappear.

The shop had so many choices of rice (and bean) cake. I think the beans being ground
were actually the stuffing for some of the rice cake.

Zip-lining the New Year in!

Occasionally on Facebook is a posting by Kim's Free Travel offering an almost-free trip that is sponsored by the government. The point of being "free" is to encourage tourism to distant places and to get pictures of foreigners having fun. Yeah, in the 5 places scheduled to visit, Youngryeong Kim, our guide, had to take pictures of us having fun and send them back to the government. Almost scared how these picts will be used, but in the meantime, our whole busload of very internationally mixed people had a blast!

On a side note, our bus represented one of the most diverse trips I've ever been on, and we weren't clique-y but could easily shift groups a bit and mix and mingle before migrating back to the friends we knew or new friends we made on the bus. Nationalities that I remember: Korean (our guide), Taiwanese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Singaporean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Mongolian, Kenyan, Egyptian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Turkey, Croatian, Czech, Madagascar person (Malagasy?), Peruvian, Mexican, French, and the Korean-American and myself the only Americans. Amazing mixture of very fun people!

Most of the people from our very cool international group!

In and around Gangjin, Jeollanamdo

1) Gangjin Dawon Tea Plantation (cancelled and was re-routed to a Literary Museum)

2) Dasan Chodang (cancelled but re-routed to a Literary Museum and on to Chaeseokgang)

• The house where Jeong Yak-yong (pen-name Dasan, 1762-1836) lived during his exile. He was a scholar of the late Joseon Dynasty and is noted for his great contributions to the development of practical learning in Korea. After he was expelled to Gangjin for writing a secret letter of appeal for religious freedom, which later was named ‘the Hwang Sa-yeong Baekseo’, he lived in the house for 18 years while studying practical learning, Silhak. Most of his renowned books were written in Dasan Chodang. 

3) Baengnyeonsa Temple (re-routed ... the government changed the IT on the day of departure)

• The temple’s most popular attraction is Forest of Common Camellias

4) Maryang Port (map)

• the port area with elevation nearby and where we with other will view the rising New Year sun
• a location where many Koreans gather to watch and celebrate the New Year in (Good location because Koreans greatly enjoy watching the sun rise over the East Sea or over the water ... the water plays is like a giant reflection pool, a feature of many Korean temples; water is where the dragons, symbols of good luck, reside)

새해복 많이받으세요! 2017 is here!

5) Gaudo Island - the southern ocean (map) (photos)

• Little island connected to the land with a long pedestrian bridge
• Will walk through the bridge
• Beautiful landscape on the bridge
• Here we will ride the zip-line
• Where we will also have a big sashimi feed! (FREE, usual price 20,000 KRW)

6) Gaudo Island Zip-line

• 1000 m length ... a whopping 1 kilometer long!
• longest in Korea
• (FREE) usual price: 25,000 KRW

And with everyone laughing and expressing crazy energy after that incredible zip over the water, we made our picture purchases of ourselves coming in for a landing, and then happily got on the bus for the long trip back to Seoul.

Thus begins another year ... and one that sure started with a lot of energy!