White mixed rice (hondonban / goldongban — Bibimbap precursor) Period BOrigin theory CVerified

White mixed rice is a plain way of eating found on the Korean peninsula: cooked rice topped with a few side dishes (banchan) and stirred together in one bowl. Unlike the later bibimbap, to which red gochujang is added, it was on the table before chili had taken root in Korea.

The main ingredient, rice, was a long-established local grain, on everyday tables from early on. The act of mixing calls for no special tool or skill either. It was an entirely ordinary way of eating, made simply by bringing leftover sides and rice together in a bowl.

For that reason the dish cannot be pinned to a single inventor or moment. The gathering at which offerings were taken down and shared after an ancestral rite (eumbok); the mountain-spirit and village-spirit rites where, lacking enough vessels, various offerings were mixed into one bowl; the custom of finishing off leftover sides by mixing them into rice on New Year's Eve (seotdal geumeum) so as not to carry them into the new year; the village wisdom of feeding a large group quickly during the busy farming season, this white mixed rice took root here and there, across both common life and ritual. Its birthplace cannot be narrowed to one, and it is more reasonable to see several such customs existing side by side.

In the written record, the oldest form of this white mixed rice that can be traced is the "hondon-ban" (혼돈반/混沌飯) recorded in Bak Dong-nyang's "Gijae japgi," written around 1591-92. The later red bibimbap is a further stage: it arose when chili and gochujang, brought over from the New World, were added to the lineage of this older mixed rice.

When the history of bibimbap is told, it has often been claimed that the true source is a dish called goldongban (골동반/骨董飯). Goldongban is a name of Chinese characters, and it carries an air of venerable pedigree.

Line up the dates, however, and the claim comes apart. The oldest record of white mixed rice, the "hondon-ban," is in the "Gijae japgi" of around 1591-92, whereas the name "goldongban" appears in Korea only in the "Annals of the Joseon Dynasty" for the seventh year of King Jeongjo (1783), in the "Simnirok" (1798), and in the "Hongjae jeonseo" (1799-1801), roughly two hundred years later. To place a name that surfaced in the records later at the origin of a mixed rice older than it is to reverse the order of time. An academic paper (by Jeong Gyeong-ran, in the Journal of the Korea Contents Association) and a compilation of food-culture sources (LampCook) both bring out this discrepancy in the dates.

The food historian Kim Yeong-bok goes further and regards the two as separate lineages from the start. The Chinese-derived goldongban, traceable to Dong Qichang's "Goldong sipsamseol" and to the writings of Su Dongpo, is a dish in which the ingredients are mixed into the rice before cooking and boiled together, closer to today's stone-pot rice (dolsotbap). Korean white mixed rice, by contrast, is stirred (bibim) into the rice only after it has been cooked; the two differ in both birth and method of preparation.

The history of the names runs alongside this. Apart from the Chinese-character name (hondon-ban / goldongban), the native Korean word "beubwium" (the ancestor of bibim) first appears in a text in Jang Hon's "Mongyupyeon" (1810), at the start of the nineteenth century. The name in Chinese characters and the native name each followed their own path.

The year 1591-92, when hondon-ban was recorded, falls before chili had spread through Korea. White mixed rice was already present in this older layer, before red gochujang came into being. As for its birthplace, the eumbok of ancestral rites, the year-end clearing of leftovers, and the communal food of the busy farming season are all still spoken of side by side, and no single origin has been settled upon.