Lady Yi’s Songp’yŏn
What is Songp’yŏn?
Songp’yŏn is a Korean rice cake is a dish that is an integral part of Korean traditional culture, as well as modern Korean society, and is typically eaten on Chuseok, Korea’s major mid-autumn harvest festival. Chuseok is a Korean national holiday that allows family members to return to their hometowns, and it was traditionally celebrated to give thanks to ancestors for a plentiful autumn harvest. Today, family members gather together at relatives’ homes to create the songp’yŏn together. Not only is songp’yŏn eaten to celebrate holidays, but it is also traditionally eaten on a child’s one hundredth day celebration, Baekil, and celebration of their first birthday, Tolchanch'i [1]. On a child’s first birthday, a family usually creates songp’yŏn and shares the rice cakes with neighbors and family friends. This custom reflects the family’s meaning for the child’s socialization [2].
Songp’yŏn is typically shaped like an oblong half-moon, with a chewy exterior consisting of tteok (rice cake) and a pocket inside filled with sweet traditional Korean ingredients such as sesame seeds and honey. Its name can be directly translated as pine tree rice cakes, as song (松) means pine tree and p’yŏn (䭏) means tteok, rice cake. The name refers to the most critical step of steaming the rice cakes over pine tree leaves when creating songp’yŏn, which allows the rice cakes to have a distinct and unique taste.
Songp’yŏn in pre-modern Korean society was also an essential part of the culture. The origins of songp’yŏn can be traced back in Tonggukseshigi, a book written by the scholar Hong Suk Mo during the Chosŏn dynasty, which explained Korean traditional customs. According to the Hong, families hung grain ears on a pole in front of their doorway every first full moon of the year to wish for a plentiful year. On Chunghwajŏl (February 1st), these grains that were hung up on their doorway were used to create songp’yŏn to give to servants. Additionally, in the Chosŏn dynasty, songp’yŏn was made with newly harvested grains to pay respects when visiting ancestors’ graves on Chuseok. Scholars assume that it was due to these various customs, that songp’yŏn became associated with thriving agriculture and harvest, leading to the symbols today’s songp’yŏn stands for [3]. It was also customary in pre-modern Korea for mothers to eat five-colored songp’yŏn on their baby’s one-hundredth day of living. This practice wished for the infant’s healthy growth with “a balance of each of the Five Phases (ohaeng)” [4].
Korean Songp’yŏn's rich history and prevalence in both pre-modern and modern Korean society were what drew me to the dish. It was fascinating how the customs of modern Korean society can be traced back to the pre-modern, and I was curious how the songp’yŏn from the Chosŏn dynasty might be different from the songp’yŏn eaten today. I sought to discover the difference in taste, as well as in methods of preparation. To satiate this curiosity, I turned to pre-modern texts to seek out the taste of traditional songp’yŏn.
Resources Utilized to Recreate Traditional Songp’yŏn
Lady Yi - The Encyclopedia of Daily Life: A Woman’s Guide to Living in Late-Chosŏn Korea
“ Kyuhapch'ongsŏ 규합총서.” Han'gungminsoktaebaekkwasajŏn 한국민속대백과사전. Kungnimminsokpangmulgwan 국립민속박물관. Accessed December 2021. https://folkency.nfm.go.kr/kr/dic/61/picture/74609/1.
To discover the difference in taste, as well as in methods of preparation of songp’yŏn, I consulted the traditional recipe for songp’yŏn written by Lady Yi in The Encyclopedia of Daily Life: A Woman’s Guide to Living in Late-Chosŏn Korea, written in 1809. The encyclopedia contains information Lady Yi thought was necessary for women of noble yangban families to housekeep and lead a successful home life. Lady Yi’s writing includes instructions for various things, some of them being instructions on cooking, creating clothes, and prenatal care. In the cooking recipe portion of the encyclopedia, the book includes many recipes for types of rice cakes, one of them being songp’yŏn. Through her recipes, Yi inadvertently reflects the eating habits of upper-class, noble Seoul families. This is understandable, as Lady Yi’s writing exerted a significant influence on the cookbooks written by other yangban daughters-in-law in the 1800s [5]. Due to Lady Yi’s status as a woman living in the Chosŏn dynasty, it can be presumed that her writing reflects an authentic and accurate version of the food eaten by pre-modern Korean society. The excerpt of the songp’yŏn recipe from her encyclopedia is shown below:
“Make rice flour very fine and make the dough a bit thinner than when making kolmu-ttŏk; steam, pound it quite a bit, and shape long and thick as if making sudan, but do not add any flour. Coil it up in a bowl, take a little piece, and make a little bowl shape—so thin that one can see through it—and put honeyed red bean stuffing mixed with cinnamon powder, black pepper powder, and dried ginger powder, and make into the shape of songp’yŏn. If they are too small or round, it is rather crude. Make them like a willow leaf and of the same size. If steamed on and in between pine leaves, it is extraordinarily tasty.”
Lady Yi provides a recipe with red bean, cinnamon, and ginger filling, which is unique to the Chosŏn dynasty and unlike the sesame fillings used in today’s Korean society. I am most familiar with eating songp’yŏn that contains sesame and honey. Her recipe for creating songp’yŏn is fairly thorough in detailing the rice cakes' shape, as she places a heavy emphasis on the aesthetics of the dish. However, her recipe does not mention the method the rice cakes must be steamed and the measurements for the ingredients. Due to these uncertainties, I utilized secondary sources as supplements to Lady Yi’s songp’yŏn recipe in the attempts to accurately recreate an authentic version of the Chosŏn dynasty songp’yŏn. I consulted sources such as A Literature Review on Korean Rice-Cakes and s cookbook written by a famous chef and traditional Korean cuisine researcher Sim Yŏngsun to bridge the information left out of Lady Yi’s recipe. I chose to draw from Sim’s cookbooks, as she is a chef and culinary research who has devoted fifty years of her life to researching traditional Korean cooking methods and even has opened a Culinary Research Institute to teach students. Her expertise in Korean cuisine is said to be like none other. Her cookbook provided guidance on the proportions of ingredients needed to create the songp’yŏn dough and times for steaming the rice cakes in my recreation.
The Recreation
The ingredients I used to recreate the songp’yŏn.
Ingredients:
Rice flour
Red bean
Black pepper powder
Dried ginger powder
Pine leaves
Cinnamon powder
Sugar
Coarse salt
Water
Sesame oil
The Process:
Preparations
First, I washed the red beans with water. Cooking red beans is a step that takes a lot of time, and thus it is advised to begin with this step. I placed an ample amount of red beans in a pot of boiling water because I did not know how much I would need, and I boiled the beans for about an hour (or until the beans softened).
Creating the Dough
While the beans were boiling, I prepared the dough. Here, I consulted the recipe written by Sim Yŏngsun. Following her recipe, I added 3 cups of rice powder, ⅕ cups of water, one teaspoon of coarse salt, and two tablespoons of sugar into a large bowl.
I stirred the contents in the bowl until it appeared to be uniform. The consistency was quite clumpy, yet held moisture so if one were to grasp the “dough”, it would stick together. The images below illustrate the consistency of the dough at this stage.
Lady Yi’s recipe called for a steaming of the dough once before actually forming the songp’yŏn. I was initially confused by this step, but I interpreted the step to be a way to get the clumpy dough sticky enough to combine together. So, I transferred the dough into a steamer with a thin cloth covering it to ensure the dough did not stick to the floor. I steamed the dough for about 20 minutes. About 10 minutes in, I stirred the dough in the steamer to ensure it did not stick to the cloth. I also made sure to keep an eye on it to ensure the dough did not cook completely.
After the twenty minutes passed, I transferred the steamed dough back into the bowl and pounded the dough with a solid rod until it became one uniform piece.
Creating the Filling
It was around this time that the red beans finished cooking, so I transferred them into a bowl. I added a copious amount of honey into the bowl with the red beans and decided to use the ginger, cinnamon, and black pepper as spices. I added them in conservative amounts rather than douse the mixture with them because I did not want the filling to be overpowered by ginger or pepper.
Even after I mixed the ingredients for the filling, the filling did not look like a paste, but rather like a mixture of cooked means and seasoning. To fix this, I decided to smash some of the beans with a spoon. This caused the mixture to become a paste-like mixture. Additionally, after a taste test, I added more honey to make the filling sweeter.
Shaping and Steaming the Songp’yŏn
I took small pieces of the dough and rolled them into a circle. Then, I used my palm to flatten the circles and used my hand to shape the circle into a small bowl. I filled the bowl with the red bean filling and folded the two ends of the dough together to create a half-moon shape. Then, I rolled the dough around a little more so that the songp’yŏn looked more like an oblong circle.
I washed the pine leaves I gathered, and then placed them in a wooden steamer. The floor of the wooden steamer was covered with a thin white cloth so the ingredients and the leaves would not stick to the bottom. Then, I put the songp’yŏn on the pine leaves and steamed them for around 10 minutes.
After steaming the rice cakes for 10 minutes, I washed them in cold water. Using a pastry brush, I spread small amounts of sesame oil onto the songp’yŏn.
Reflections
The end result turned out better than I expected it to be. The dough was chewy and the sweet filling was surprisingly good. I thought the combination of ginger, cinnamon, and pepper to be quite odd, but instead, the flavors worked well together.
Difficulties I Had & How I Retained Authenticity
I prepared the ingredients according to what Lady Yi’s recipe called for, with the exception of the black pepper powder. I used a black pepper grinder, then attempted to crush the ground pieces into smaller particles to make it closer like a powder. I do not believe this greatly hindered the authenticity of the recipe, as this was a minuscule step.
A difficulty I initially had when approaching Lady Yi’s recipe was the lack of measurements for the ingredients to create the dough. To figure out the needed measurements, I decided to consult a cookbook written by Sim Yŏngsun, a famous Korean chef and traditional Korean cuisine researcher. As mentioned before, her expertise in traditional Korean foods is reflected through her fifty years of Korean culinary research and her position as the head of the Culinary Research Institute in Seoul. Thus, I used the measurements from Oksudong Sŏnsaeng Shimyŏngsunŭi 30nyŏn Nohau Ch'oegoŭi Urimat, and I also figured out the time needed to steam the dough from the book. In addition, Sim’s recipe called for coarse salt and sugar, which was different from Yi’s recipe which did not specify whether to season the dough or not. I believe that pre-modern recipes used to create songp’yŏn most likely included seasoning, but because Lady Yi was writing to a female audience about housekeeping information, she most likely assumed the readers already had tacit knowledge about creating songp’yŏn and did not include details such as seasoning and time to steam. Lady Yi’s assumption that her audience must possess tacit knowledge about rice cakes is exemplified when she states in the recipe, “make the dough a bit thinner than when making kolmu-ttŏk” and “shape long and thick as if making sudan”. This shows how she assumes the audience already knows how to make these rice cakes, and her decision to omit specific details on such steps shows how there must be more details to the recipe that she omitted. Thus, I believe it was necessary to consult an outside source that held background knowledge about how to create rice cakes and the basic steps which I did by reading Sim’s cookbook. I believe by drawing from culinary researcher Sim Yŏngsun’s works, the authenticity of my recreation was not greatly compromised due to her devotion to recreating traditional recipes.
An additional piece of information that Lady Yi did not specify in her recipe was how the songp’yŏn must be served in her recipe after steaming it for the final time. Thus, A Literature Review on Korean Rice-Cakes was utilized to bridge this gap of information in Yi’s recipe. According to Lee and Maeng, songp’yŏn was washed with cold water after steaming and brushed with sesame oil before being served. Thus, I drew upon this information and applied it to my experiment.
Also, in terms of the tools used to recreate the recipe, I believed that using a wooden steamer must be helpful to imitate the way rice cakes were steamed in pre-modern Korea. I used a bamboo steamer for the final steaming process of the songp’yŏn, and I believe this is a factor that adds to the authenticity of my recreation.
Overall, I believe that I tried to the best of my ability to follow the recipe of Lady Yi by obtaining the necessary ingredients and consulting credible and authentic sources to bridge any gaps in information to create songp’yŏn.
How to Improve for the Future
In her recipe, Lady Yi states the dough must be spread “so thin that one can see through it” [8]. I applied this step to my recreation process when creating the dough. Whereas the songp’yŏns where I made the dough extremely thin actually ended up ripping during the steaming process, the songp’yŏns where I decided to make based on what I believed would work better ended up not ripping and stayed intact. I do not believe Lady Yi meant for the audience to take that step quite literally, so I plan on not making the dough too thin for future tries.
Additionally, I stated earlier that I interpreted Lady Yi’s filling recipe in a way such that I believed the cinnamon, ginger, and black pepper were just for seasoning the red bean paste. I still believe that red beans should be the main ingredient for the filling, but after tasting a couple of the rice cakes, I believe including more cinnamon and honey would upgrade the taste and make it more complex.
An additional change I would make is the time I took to pound the once-steamed dough. Although my final product matched the description of the shape and size of the songp’yŏn Lady Yi wrote about, the exterior of the songp’yŏn was quite bumpy and not smooth. According to traditional Korean customs, if a woman creates a songp’yŏn with a beautiful shape and appearance, it means she will give birth to a beautiful daughter, which is supposed to be a blessing according to Korean society. From these traditions, it can be assumed aesthetics of songp’yŏn play a large part. I believe that perhaps if I were to pound the once-steamed dough for longer, the dough might have come out more uniform and looked smoother when steamed again. This is a step I intend to include the next time I recreate songp’yŏn.
Pre-Modern v.s. Modern Songp’yŏn and My Final Comments
Overall, I tried my best to adhere to Lady Yi’s traditional songp’yŏn recipe, while consulting academic secondary sources on Korean rice cakes and cookbooks written by a culinary researcher. Lady Yi’s recipe omitted many details regarding the measurements required for the songp’yŏn dough, how to steam the rice cakes, how to serve the rice cakes, and more. This exclusion of details reflects her assumption that the audience must possess tacit knowledge of traditional Korean rice cakes since her encyclopedia was targeted towards Korean housewives. I was not of this demographic, and thus needed to consult secondary sources. However, I also possessed some tacit knowledge on what songp’yŏn should look like and how the dough must be shaped to include the filling. I believe my own tacit knowledge from being exposed to Korean culture came in handy during this recreation. I found it interesting how although this recipe was extremely foreign to be in the way the songp’yŏn was created, I had never been exposed to the method of steaming dough twice or the red bean, ginger, pepper, and cinnamon filling before. However, due to my prior knowledge of having eaten songp’yŏn and watching relatives create it, I was able to make some assumptions during the recreation process which helped me to succeed to create a final product.
The process of creating the songp’yŏn according to the Chosŏn dynasty recipe differed from modern recipes in that the recipe called for steaming the dough twice, pounding the dough, and the fillings were different from what is commonly used today. Despite these differences, the songp’yŏn did not taste outstandingly different from the songp’yŏn I’ve had in Korea before, leading me to believe songp’yŏn is a well-kept tradition in Korean society. Not only has the customs involving songp’yŏn, such as Chuseok and ceremonial rites, been preserved in Korean society, but the taste of songp’yŏn has been as well.
Sources
[1] “Songp’Yŏn 송편.” Han'gungminsoktaebaekkwasajŏn 한국민속대백과사전. Kungnimminsokpangmulgwan 국립민속박물관. Accessed December 2021. https://folkency.nfm.go.kr/kr/topic/detail/7777.
[2] Yun Sŏsŏk 윤서석. “Han'gugŭi Ttŏngmunhwa. Tongashiashiksaenghwarhak'oe Haksulbalp'yodaehoenonmunjip 한국의 떡문화. 동아시아식생활학회 학술발표대회논문집.” (2008): 1-7.
[3] “Songp'yŏn 송편(松─).” Han'gungminjongmunhwadaebaekkwasajŏn 한국민족문화대백과사전 . http://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Contents/SearchNavi?keyword=%EC%86%A1%ED%8E%B8&ridx=0&tot=13#self, n.d. Accessed December 2021.
[4] Michael J. Pettid, Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History (London: Reaktion Books, 2008).
[5] “ Kyuhapch'ongsŏ 규합총서.” Han'gungminsoktaebaekkwasajŏn 한국민속대백과사전. Kungnimminsokpangmulgwan 국립민속박물관. Accessed December 2021. https://folkency.nfm.go.kr/kr/topic/detail/7394. .
[6] Lee, Cherl-Ho, and Young-Sun Maeng. “A Literature Review on Korean Rice-Cakes.” Korean J. Dietary Culture 2, no. 2 (1987).
[7]. Sim Yŏngsun, Oksudong Sŏnsaeng Shimyŏngsunŭi 30nyŏn Nohau Ch'oegoŭi Urimat 옥수동 선생 심영순의 30년 노하우 최고의 우리맛 (Tongailbosa, 2001).
[8] Pettid, Michael J., and Kil Cha. The Encyclopedia of Daily Life: A Woman’s Guide to Living in Late-Chosŏn Korea. University of Hawai’i Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1bn9jks.