송편

Songpyeon is song, "pine" (松), and pyeon, a native Korean word that names a rice cake in polite speech: the cake steamed on a bed of pine needles. Ask what the word means and the Standard Korean Dictionary answers outright: "a rice cake made by kneading non-glutinous rice flour, filling it with red bean, soybean, chestnut, jujube or sesame, shaping it like a half-moon or a clam, and steaming it on a bed of pine needles; commonly made at Chuseok." The dictionary gives the word's source form as 松편 — the first syllable a Chinese character, the second a Korean syllable with no character behind it. That second syllable is the one to look at. It is easy to assume that songpyeon is a worn-down pronunciation of the purely Sino-Korean songbyeong (松餠), but the dictionary keeps songbyeong as a separate synonym and explains the pyeon of songpyeon as a native word, a polite name for tteok — the same pyeon that ends cake names such as jeolpyeon and jeungpyeon. The dictionary even lists pyeon itself as a synonym of jeolpyeon, and writes the source form of jeungpyeon as 蒸편 — one character joined to the native pyeon, exactly as in songpyeon. Songpyeon, then, is a word in which one Chinese character and one Korean word stand side by side: a hybrid that holds the pine of 松 and the cake of pyeon within a single name. Why, then, did a pine get into the name of a rice cake? The answer lies in how it is steamed. A layer of pine needles is spread in the steamer and the shaped cakes are laid on top. A cake steamed on pine needles — hence 松. The usual explanation for the needles is that they keep the cakes from sticking to one another and lend them the scent of pine; this is best taken as a long-standing received account rather than a documented fact. Either way, what the name points to is not an ingredient but that one layer of needles. Whatever the filling, whether shaped as a half-moon or a clam, the cake earns the name songpyeon by being steamed on pine. The character 松 sets the phonetic 公 beside tree (木): the evergreen pine. Pyeon has no character at all and has come down by sound alone, so the dictionary leaves the hangul syllable 편 standing in its place. Half of the word is written in a Chinese character and half in hangul — the name songpyeon is itself a small specimen of how Korean took Chinese characters in and set them beside its own words. The cake is recorded in late Joseon, in Hong Seok-mo's Dongguk sesigi of 1849. There it appears as more than a cake of the Chuseok season alone — the entry for Chuseok itself, in fact, does not mention it. Under the first day of the second month, the passage on this cake reads: "大者如掌小者如卵 皆作半璧樣 蒸豆爲饀 隔鋪松葉於甑內 蒸熟而出 洗以水塗以香油 名曰松餠 饋奴婢如齒數 俗稱是日爲奴婢日 東作伊始故饗此屬云" — the large ones the size of a palm and the small ones the size of an egg, all shaped like a half bi-disc (半璧), that is, a half-moon; steamed beans for the filling; pine needles spread in layers inside the steamer; taken out when done, washed with water and brushed with sesame oil, and called songbyeong; fed to the nobi, the household bondservants, one for each year of age, so that the day is popularly called Nobi-il, the servants' day — the farming year, it explains, was just beginning, and so this company was feasted. The half-moon and the pine needles already stand side by side in a single sentence, and while the book gives no reason for the needles, it does record the finishing — the cakes washed and oiled once steamed. Among the entries for the eighth month as a whole, the same book says the rice-cake shops make songpyeon of early rice (早稻松餠) and counts it among the foods of the autumn season. In spring it was a cake given to those who would work the coming year's fields; in autumn, the cake that held the first harvest. Why, then, is songpyeon shaped like a half-moon? One widely told story is attached to this. In the Samguk sagi, Annals of Baekje, twentieth year of King Uija, the words "百濟同月輪 新羅如月新" are found written on the back of a turtle — Baekje is like the full moon, Silla like the new moon — and the shaman in the record read them to mean that a full moon can only wane while a new moon can only wax, a prophecy of Silla's victory; the people of Silla, the story goes, then shaped their cakes after the waxing moon. This, however, should be taken as a later folk explanation. The passage in the Samguk sagi is about moons, not cakes, and no cake called songpyeon appears anywhere in that record. The reason for the half-moon is not confirmed by any document; it survives as story alone. The half-moon shape itself, however, is on record: the Dongguk sesigi writes that the cakes are "all shaped like a half bi-disc (皆作半璧樣)" — the bi being a round jade disc, so a half-moon — and the record of 1849 already shows the cakes being shaped that way. The clam shape the dictionary lists beside the half-moon is, if anything, closer to the form that comes of itself when a cake is folded and pinched shut in the hand. Today songpyeon sits at the centre of the Chuseok offering table. In the days before the holiday the rice mills take order after order for songpyeon, and a family sitting in a circle shaping cakes is the familiar picture of the evening before Chuseok. Beside the songpyeon on the offering table there are often jeon and bindaetteok as well. The saying that whoever shapes a pretty songpyeon will have a pretty daughter has been passed down at that same evening table. Those retracing the journey home carry songpyeon packed for them in their hometowns, and these days convenience stores and cafés put out songpyeon of their own when Chuseok comes round. Green cakes with mugwort, cakes tinted with pumpkin or omija, bite-sized cakes filled with sesame — the shapes and colours have multiplied. Still, in the houses where the cakes are steamed on pine needles as before, the cake on the table smells of pine. Inside the name songpyeon a Chinese character and a Korean word stand together. The pine stayed at the front of the name; the cake stayed behind it in Korean. Songpyeon, "pine, cake": a name for a cake steamed on pine needles, written half in a Chinese character and half in Korean.