White mixed rice (hondon-ban / goldong-ban) 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.

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: in all these settings, across both common life and ritual, white mixed rice took root here and there. 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 said to be 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.

Two names written in Chinese characters have been attached to white mixed rice: hondon-ban (혼돈반/混沌飯) and goldongban (골동반/骨董飯). Goldongban in particular carries an air of venerable pedigree, and it is sometimes spoken of as the dish's source. Follow the records, though, and how the two names relate to the mixed rice turns out to be less settled than it sounds.

Hondon-ban is said to appear first. According to Korean research and a compilation of food-culture sources, the name is found in Bak Dong-nyang's "Gijae japgi" of around 1591-92. For goldongban, one view takes the "Annals of the Joseon Dynasty" for the seventh year of King Jeongjo (1783) as its first appearance in Korea, followed by the "Simnirok" (1798) and the "Hongjae jeonseo" (1799-1801), roughly two hundred years after hondon-ban.

That sequence of dates is not as firm as it looks. A poem by the late-Joseon scholar Yi Ik (1681-1763), titled 澆饡 for rice with broth poured over it, sets "goldong" as a food beside that dish, so the word was already in use as the name of a food before 1763. The poem does not say what goldong was, and whether it is the same thing as the later goldongban cannot be decided from the poem alone. Even so, it rules out saying flatly that the name goldongban first appeared in 1783.

Whether goldongban and the mixed rice are the same dish is also disputed. The food historian Kim Yeong-bok regards them as separate lineages. 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; in his view the two differ in both birth and method of preparation. The Korean researcher Jeong Gyeong-ran (2015), on the other hand, reads goldongban, goldong, and hondon-ban all as Chinese-character renderings of bibimbap, and traces them as a single history of some five hundred years.

The history of the names runs alongside this. Apart from the Chinese-character names (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 names in Chinese characters and the native name each followed their own path.

The years 1591-92, when hondon-ban is said to have been recorded, fall before chili had spread through Korea. White mixed rice was already present in that earlier age, before red gochujang was added. 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. Nor has it been settled how the name goldongban ties in with this mixed rice.