Tteokbokki Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The tteokbokki most of us picture today is a Seoul street snack: rod-shaped rice cakes stir-fried scarlet with the chili paste gochujang. But trace back how long that red heat has existed, and the history turns out to be surprisingly shallow.

The rice cakes at its center are an old food made from rice, long a fixture on the peninsula's tables. Turning those cakes scarlet calls for chili, a New World crop. Jibong yuseol, a miscellany compiled by the scholar Yi Su-gwang in 1614, records it under the name "southern barbarian pepper" and says it first came from Japan. It does not give the year it arrived; the usual view places it in the late sixteenth century, around the Japanese invasions of Korea. Until the chili had crossed the sea and the red fermented paste gochujang made from it came into use, a dish of rice cakes fried red had no way of coming into being.

A non-spicy tteokbokki once existed too. The late-nineteenth-century cookbook Siuijeonseo records a court tteokbokki seasoned with soy sauce (gungjung-tteokbokki). It used no chili and tasted nothing like today's dish, an earlier form rather than the same thing. The red street-stall version spread only in the mid-twentieth century, said to date to 1953 in the Sindang-dong district of Seoul. A man named Ma Bok-rim, inspired by chunjang - the black-bean seasoning of Chinese restaurants - is widely recounted to have sold rice cakes stir-fried in gochujang, and won a following. Apart from the refined soy-sauce dish of the court, the red tteokbokki took root among ordinary people as a cheap, spicy snack of the streets.

The belief that the red, fiery tteokbokki of the food stalls is an ancient Korean tradition runs deep. But it does not square with the record.

The chili that gives the dish its heat is a New World crop. Jibong yuseol, compiled in 1614, calls it "southern barbarian pepper" and notes that because it first came from Japan, people commonly called it "Japanese mustard." The use it records is a tavern one: wine shops grew it and mixed it into their distilled liquor. Red tteokbokki belongs to a later stage, once chili had made its way into cooking and into gochujang. The talk of an "ancient tradition" confuses the age of tteokbokki as a dish of fried rice cakes with the newness of the red form, which only appeared once chili had come.

Follow the texts, and until the first half of the twentieth century tteokbokki meant a soy-sauce dish. The late-nineteenth-century cookbook Siuijeonseo is where the dish first appears in writing, as a court rice-cake dish seasoned with soy sauce. The list of ingredients often quoted alongside it - beef, scallions, rock tripe, and pine nuts - comes from a later cookbook, Bang Sin-yeong's Joseon yori jebeop (1917; revised and enlarged 1942), not from Siuijeonseo itself. The tteokbokki recorded in the 1924 Joseon Musang Sinsik Yori Jebeop is likewise soy-sauce based, not red gochujang. No trace of the red street-stall tteokbokki from before the mid-twentieth century has yet been found.

So when was the red tteokbokki born? What is widely told is a mid-twentieth-century popularization. In 1953, in the Sindang-dong district of Seoul, Ma Bok-rim (1921-2011) is said to have taken the chunjang of Chinese restaurants as inspiration, fried rice cakes in gochujang, and sold them from a stall to great success. No record, however, is firm enough to make it the invention of one individual; the story remains an anecdote. Even so, every account agrees on one point: the red tteokbokki is a modern dish that spread after the chili had arrived. From the court's soy-sauce seasoning to the street's red heat - the course of tteokbokki is the story of a later-arriving chili laying a new dish over the old foundation of the rice cake.