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Annually, about 1 or 2 a.m. on January 1, Joline O’Leary drove home from a big New Year’s Eve party. Before going to bed at night, after drinking champagne and fireworks, she eats a bowl of tteok guk, a modest Korean soup consisting of boiled beef broth with tteok cakes or thin oval rice cakes. , sliced. O’Leary, whom I met on a recent trip to Honolulu, is a fourth generation Korean-American. For her, this ritual is the first thing she wants to tick off her list for the new year. “Fortunately,” she said, “and I appreciate tradition.”
In Korea, it is said that eating a bowl of rice cake soup on New Year’s Day – whether according to the Gregorian or lunar calendar – marks the passing of a year and growing old by one. Snow-white rice cakes, shaped like small coins, represent purity and luck; The long, cylindrical logs from which these rounds are cut, known as garae tteok, are said to symbolize long life. Traditionally, the main method of calculating a person’s age, known as “Korean age”, starts from when a child is 1 year old at birth – allocating time in the womb, according to one theory – and then add another year on January 1st. For many Koreans, “How many bowls of tteok guk did you eat?” is a way to ask people’s age.
But I never liked that dish. The rice cake soup I grew up in Atlanta was made from giant stainless steel tanks, from the church where my mother had faithfully volunteered for decades. It’s hard to make anything in such large quantities taste good, especially the tteok guk which is known for its bland taste. The soup makes the bland rice cakes harder to swallow.
For my friend Esther Choi, who grew up in South Jersey, her unfamiliarity with the texture of rice cakes gave her a hard time. “It’s not that I eat tteok very often,” she said. But Esther, now a chef and owner of many Korean restaurants in New York City, said she has come to appreciate the essence of tteok guk, even falling in love with it. It’s a starchy celebration of life. (“I still don’t want to eat it every year, though,” she adds.)
