seoul food for people who love to eat
Happy Chuseok and a Guide to Charye
3Oct2009 Filed under: explications 설명 Author: fatmanseoul
Fatman hopes you’re all enjoying a wonderful 추석 (chuseok), and chowing down on all sorts of delights. As part of the festivities, we (recycle and re)offer this guide to the most important part of the holiday: 차례 (charye), or the ritual offerings of food and drink to the ancestors. Most importantly, we show you how to deck the halls with boughs of 차레 foods and treat you and your genetic predecessors right. Enjoy your holiday, whether you’re out in the countryside with your family or hanging out in the strangely empty Seoul.
This ritual isn’t quite the same as more familiar jesa (재사) although in form it is very similar. Jesa rituals are performed at regular intervals (usually according to the lunar calendar) following the death of a specific family member. Charye are for a more collective group of ancestors stretching on back through time. They’re held at different times of day (jesa at night, charye in the mornings) and mean slightly different things, but both are important and look pretty darned similar in modern practice. And they both involve immense, crazy, gargantuan amounts of food.
How much food? Enough that prep can take days, even weeks. Enough that lots of Koreans skip the homework and order their food online (get your family ancestor worship needs met here, here, or here.) Women especially have taken to this innovation, seeing as however liberated they might be in their daily lives seem to become drafted for a few days of thankless servitude while the menfolk goof off for all but about ten minutes of incense burning, wine pouring, and bowing.
Strangely enough, there’s not a lot of consistency from region to region, household to household as to what food actually goes on the ancestral table. Some families always boil up an octopus, others set out a few bananas. There are a few general rules, however:
At the very back is a folding screen. Many families use a double-sided screen with colorful flowers or birds on one side for happy occasions like weddings, and calligraphy on the other for more solemn events like jesa and charye. In front of the screen is a large, low table set with a small shrine to hold pictures of the deceased or written prayers called a “shinui (신위). Also holding place in the back row are cups for alcohol, candles, rice, soup, and chopsticks. In the next row from the back you’ll find cooked dishes, particularly flesh, fowl, and fish. Next out are dried dishes like squid, and veggies. In the front are fruits, which can mean whatever is in season but almost always will include dates (대추/daechu), chestnuts (밤/bam), pears (배/be), and dried persimmons (감/gam). There are all kinds of different ways to coordinate it including direction and color, but by now Fatman hopes you’ve got the basic idea. Just to compare, here are three different guide to how to set up your charye table . . . good luck!
image from www.koreartnet.com
image from i.kdaq.empas.com
image from munhwa.com
- Tags: charye, chuseok, 차례, 추석, ritual food
8 Responses to “Happy Chuseok and a Guide to Charye”
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우리 FatManSeoul는 이러한 이유로 한국의 최고의 음식에 대한 최고의 리뷰와 비평을 공유하고 싶습니다. FatManSeoul는 평범한 음식에서부터 고급음식까지, 강남지역 최고급 레스토랑에서부터 시골 할머니의 집에서 맛볼 수 있는 정이 깃든 찌게까지 모든 음식을 리뷰 대상으로 삼고 있습니다. 우리는 특별한 음식을 찾아 블로그를 통해 전세계에 소개할 것입니다. 또한 음식에 대한 가장 정확한 정보를 리뷰, 레시피, 인터뷰, 팟캐스트, 교재 등을 통해 제공할 것입니다. 이 모든 컨텐츠는 한국어와 영어로 제공될 것입니다. FatManSeoul is Korea's first bilingual online magazine about food. We’re committed to searching high and lo, from the poshest cuisine of Kangnam to the most humble, jeong-laden jjigae of the halmoni-jip in the countryside for the best food in the country. Come here for reviews, recipes, interviews, podcasts, tutorials, and the best, most accurate information on ingredients and methods, in Korean and in English. 같이 먹자!
Paul / samedi
October 3rd, 2009 at 5:34 pm
As indicated in your second picture, I’ve often read / heard that red food is presented to the east and white food to the west. Similarly, meat is often placed to the east and fish to the west. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter is one of those areas where each family has a slightly different interpretation. There’s also an image available here (scroll down a ways) that includes the names of the various utensils used to prepare the jesa table offering.
추석 잘 보내세요~!! ^^
Joseph Steinberg
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Readers can view an actual jesasang here, from my family’s table in Busan – my wife’s family is originally from Gangwon. (The second photo is mine.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesa
fatmanseoul
October 4th, 2009 at 11:43 pm
or they can look at the first picture on this page
although technically this isn’t a jesasang, because it’s not a jesa. It’s a charyesang, but much the same in terms of set-up.
fatmanseoul
October 4th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
We wouldn’t be surprised in the least ^^ There’s tremendous variation in jesa and charyesang, with differences among regions and individual families.
Joseph Steinberg
October 5th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
The composition of the table has never changed, except for minor substitutions for seasonal availability, for jesa and charye. For some reason a few years ago makkeoli substituted for soju. Only for New Year’s is there any variation in the charye, when all the married couples have to make an offering. The rest of the year, it’s a stripped-down ceremony.
3gyupsal
October 5th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Has anyone else heard of how families keep their individual rituals at a training place from where their family name originated? For example if you are the 30th generation of the milyang Park family, there might be some kind of Hanoak that your family built in Milyang, where the oldest son from each family has to go and learn his famly’s tradition for arranging food on the table. Has anyone heard of anything like that?
fatmanseoul
October 5th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
we’re assuming you’re talking about your own family’s ceremonies, here . . .
fatmanseoul
October 5th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
It’s not usually that clear. Lots of families head clan house isn’t in the same place as their clan affiliation would seem to indicate. Nonetheless, as far as being a Gyeongju Kim or anything like that goes . . . you’d only maintain that kind of relationship with the head house if you were fairly direct in terms of lineage. That’s a very small group usually, but yes, often those families have very elaborate rituals. There are also guide books directing people how to set up the jesa and charyesang, but in many cases it’s the women, not the men, who do the set-up (just like they do everything else during the holidays!) Usually women learn set up directly from their mother-in-law and women of the senior generation, and they can usually do it from memory – particularly in families where jesa and charye are frequent. Most people learn the proper procedures used in their family through observation and participation.