Seasons & Traditions

Why Red Bean Porridge Appears on Korea’s Winter Solstice

August 23, 2026

A bowl of Dongji patjuk can look startlingly dramatic: thick, dark-red porridge with little white rice balls bobbing at the surface.

It arrives around Dongji, Korea’s winter solstice. At first, it seems like sensible cold-weather food—warm, filling, and made from red beans. But its place on this particular day comes from much more than appetite.

A bowl of dark-red Dongji patjuk with small white glutinous-rice balls

Historically, the porridge marked the year’s darkest turning point. Its red color was believed to help keep harmful forces away, while the return of longer days made Dongji feel like a small beginning inside winter.

The longest night was a turning point

Dongji is the 22nd of the 24 traditional solar terms used in Korea. It falls around December 22, though the Gregorian date varies by year, and it is the point when the night is longest and daylight is shortest.

That made it more than an especially cold date on the calendar. After the solstice, daylight begins to increase again. In traditional seasonal thinking, the year had reached its darkest edge and was beginning to turn back toward light.

Dongji was therefore called jageun seollal, or “little New Year.” It was not a substitute for Seollal, the Lunar New Year, but it carried a related sense of renewal. A traditional saying held that one truly became a year older only after eating Dongji patjuk.

That is the first answer to the bowl’s timing: it belongs to a seasonal threshold. Patjuk was food for the moment when winter darkness had gone as far as it could go—and the days were set to lengthen again.

Why did the porridge have to be red?

The color was central to the old custom. In Korean folk belief, red was regarded as a yang color and was thought capable of repelling yin ghosts or other harmful forces. Red-bean porridge made that protective color impossible to miss.

Before the family ate, Dongji patjuk could be used in a household rite. Historical accounts describe people offering it at a family shrine and placing or sprinkling it at the gate, in rooms, around storage jars, and elsewhere in the home. The purpose was to drive away bad fortune or unwelcome spirits at this vulnerable-looking point in the year.

So the porridge did two jobs in the traditional imagination. It was a meal, but it was also part of a seasonal act of protection. The striking red bowl was not merely decorative or chosen for flavor.

That does not mean red beans have scientifically demonstrated powers over luck, illness, or spirits. The protective meaning belongs to folk cosmology: a historical way of understanding color, danger, darkness, and the return of light.

Those white balls have a name

The small glutinous-rice balls floating in the porridge are called saealsim. Their name means something like “bird-egg filling,” a reference to their small egg-like shape.

They are made from glutinous rice dough, rolled into small rounds, then cooked with the porridge. Against the soft bean base, they add a pleasantly chewy texture—and make Dongji patjuk immediately recognizable.

They also connect the dish to the passage of time. One recorded custom was to put in saealsim according to each family member’s age. It was not a universal rule for every bowl, then or now, but it fits the “little New Year” feeling of the day: a meal could quietly count both the people at home and another year of life.

Traditional Dongji patjuk is made by boiling red beans, straining them, and cooking the bean liquid with rice. Saealsim may be added as it cooks. It is not automatically a sweet dessert: traditional instructions call for seasoning with salt, while sugar may be added according to taste. A bowl can therefore be savory, lightly sweet, or somewhere between the two.

An old ritual, a still-visible seasonal food

Dongji patjuk has been tied to the solstice in Korea for a long time. Poems in the collections Mok-eunjip and Ikjaejip indicate that it was already established as a seasonal food in the Goryeo period. Joseon-era books on seasonal customs also record making it on Dongji.

The precise date at which the custom entered Korea is unknown. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture describes it as thought to have been transmitted from a Chinese custom. What is clear is that it became firmly rooted in Korean seasonal life, where the solstice, red color, household protection, and porridge came to form one tradition.

The distinction that matters today is between eating the food and performing the older rite. A 2018 Korea.net account described the exorcism ritual as rarely practiced, while patjuk remained a popular Dongji dish. Official tourism information published in 2023 still presents red-bean porridge as food associated with the winter solstice and its traditional red-color symbolism.

That is not evidence that every household makes patjuk, counts rice balls by age, or sprinkles porridge at the door each December. It does explain why the dish remains culturally legible in late winter, including at public and heritage events.

So when you see that dark-red porridge dotted with white saealsim, you are looking at more than a warming bean dish. The bowl carries the logic of Dongji itself: darkness has reached its limit, light is beginning to return, and a vivid red food once stood guard at the threshold.