Jeungpyeon-beop (Fermented Steamed Rice Cake)

History

Jeungpyeon (증편), also called sultteok, "wine cake," is a steamed rice cake raised by fermentation rather than pounding: non-glutinous rice flour is worked with rice wine and left to swell, giving a spongy, faintly sour, bread-like crumb unlike dense pounded tteok. Because the batter ferments with alcohol, the finished cake resists spoiling in heat, which made it a favored warm-season food long tied to the summer festival of Dano. Eumsik dimibang's 증편법 stands among the earliest Korean-language records of the cake. Jang Gye-hyang raises the ground rice not with today's bottled makgeolli but with a home-made rice-and-nuruk wine starter (giju): she lets it foam, strains it, thins it to a batter about the thickness of thick bean gruel, lets it rise, then steams it exactly as she steams her fermented sanghwa buns, placing jeungpyeon within the same 17th-century leavened-dough craft. The method is unbroken: modern jeungpyeon still rises on makgeolli and steams into the same airy round cake, now often dressed with jujube, pine nut, and chestnut. As a fermented-grain confection it carries no chili or other New-World ingredient, consistent with the book's pre-chili date.

Ingredients

• rice
• rice (for the leaven-liquor)
• nuruk (fermentation starter)
• spoonful (each feeding) good rice wine

Instructions

1. Damp-mill mitdani, ollye or nanggyeongja rice into flour; sift through a warm sieve and sift again.
2. Leaven-liquor (for 1 mal of jeungpyeon): wash 1 doe of good rice, cook soft, cool.
3. Shave and soak good nuruk; when swollen, strain off the water, then rub and strain until about a bowlful of white liquid remains.
4. Mix the liquid into the rice, add a spoonful of good wine; when it ferments, cook 3 hop of rice soft, cool, and mix into the wine.
5. When that ferments and bubbles appear the next day, strain loosely through a wine-bag.
6. Dissolve the rice flour with the liquor, loosen thick like bean gruel, and leave about half a day until risen to about seven-tenths.
7. Set out and steam as for sanghwa.