Sinseollo has many names and different origin stories. The dish is named after the special pot the dish is cooked in and it has been called the "food of the mountain gods." It is a dish with many names such as, "a dish made from a new kind of plates;" and "a stew that gives the tongue great pleasure."

The pot is a round bowl like a bundt cake that has a hole in the center in which the soup is cooked. The hole has a furnace hole that flows down to the base in which white hot coals are placed to cook the broth and other ingredients. Now inside of the bowl that cooks the broth has an elaborate arrangement of different ingredients such as: beef ribs, meat cakes made of chicken and pheasant, intestines, gray mullet, abalone, sea cucumber, green onions, scallion, radish roots, ginkgo nuts, ginger, black pepper, dates, pine nuts and egg whites. All of the different ingredients are intricately arranged in the pot by color, shape and length then a broth is slowly poured in without disturbing the arrangement of all the ingredients and simmered with the hot coals in the center of the bowl. The result is a rainbow of different ingredients that are slowly simmered to create a heavenly broth and a vast array of flavors.

Another very interesting name for the Sinseollo pot is that it is called the "fire pot of the hermit". In this tale about the pot, a politician had to escape the massacre of scholars during the Chosun dynasty. This scholar, Chung Hee-ryang, ran away to the mountains and lived a solitary life as a hermit. He made his own pot,the Sinseollo, and he used it to cook his meals. In this origin story, the pot or "ro" was used by a hermit (sinseon) hence the name, sinseollo.

However, their is some dispute about this story because many others say that travelers to China found this pot and brought it back home and cooked a Korean version of the dish.
Regardless of the origins, this very popular Korean dish has become an important part of Korean food culture.