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Though I tend to call this holiday “Chinese” New Year, it turns out Lunar New Year is not the sole province of the Chinese. The Vietnamese have Tet, various Chinese communities in Indonesia and Malaysia have their versions, and Koreans have Soll.

Like Chinese New Year (and western New Year celebrations, for that matter), Korean New Year has much to do with renewal, starting afresh, clean slates. There are also similar traditions of getting families together, dressing up in traditional garb, playing games, and honoring ancestors. But most importantly, there are rice cakes.

While the versions Chinese people eat for New Year tend to be sweet, the rice cakes Koreans care about this time of year are put in a savory soup, dduk gook. (Dduk = rice cake, which comes in many forms in the Korean repertoire; the one used in this soup is the sliced oval version you can find at supermarkets like Han Ah Reum in K-Town.) (Photo by Christine)

And since dduk gook wasn’t ever a part of my New Year growing up, I asked my friend Joyce L. to describe the soup:

Growing up I always looked forward to the New Year because my mom would prepare dduk gook for us all.

My family would gather around the table, which was already set with the fixings in the middle: long yellow strips of fried egg, the all important crunchy salty gim also cut into strips, green onions (which I avoided, bad Korean that I am), and crumbled bulgogi.

My mom would set down steaming bowls of dduk gook in front of us and we’d be able to add whichever ingredients we wanted and stir it all together. Dduk has this great chewy texture and I loved how the soup coated everything, making it slimy and oh so good.