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Suddenly, I miss the path along the dike where I used to jog every morning on my way home. I miss the early morning sun casting my shadow 5 or 6 meters long. I miss the lingering morning mist behind the trees at the foot of the Rang Hac mountain range. And I miss the clear, delightful, and satisfying sounds that I can never find in the city: the sound of fish splashing beneath the withered lotus stems, waiting for the glorious summer...
In the past, sticky rice cakes (bánh chưng and bánh mật) were only available during Tet (Vietnamese Lunar New Year). Now, they're available year-round; if you want bánh mật, just go to one of the stalls selling local snacks. I remember that around mid-winter, on a day without drizzle or biting wind, my mother would go to the garden to select dried banana leaves, cut out intact, wide, square pieces, stack them, and tie them together with banana leaves to use for wrapping bánh mật just before Tet.
Freshly wrapped rice cakes
These dried banana leaves must be freshly wilted, not too fresh but not too wilted either, as they would be brittle and break the cake. The honey cake is made from glutinous rice flour mixed with molasses. I remember that whenever we made the cake, the molasses was boiled just right, and my mother would roast a few crushed ginger roots and sprinkle them into the boiling molasses. The aroma of the boiling molasses, mixed with the scent of the roasted ginger, filled the whole house, warming the entire winter with the scent of abundance, warmth, and the joyful feeling of the coming of Tet and Spring. My mother had her children clean the banana leaves, spread the mixture of glutinous rice flour and molasses with ginger, and let it cool. These were then spread onto small pieces of banana leaf, wrapped around a mold, and then covered with the main banana leaf to form a neat square before being placed in a pot to be boiled.
Honey cakes are a kind of "extra" cake, not necessarily a staple like sticky rice cakes for Tet. After boiling, the cakes are usually tied with bamboo strips dyed pink to give them a festive look, with five cakes tied together, symbolizing the five elements, to offer to ancestors or to share and eat gradually until the first two months of the lunar year. There's another cake similar to honey cakes called thorny leaf cakes, but it's mixed with thorny leaves (I don't even remember what kind of leaves they are anymore). I remember one year someone gave us a bundle of thorny leaves wrapped in dried banana leaves. My mother saved them for Tet to use in making cakes for me, but when we opened it, the leaves were covered in green and white mold, so we had to throw them away quickly. Those were very poor times, very touching, but also very warm.
Sugarcane molasses is a syrupy liquid similar to honey, a product obtained from sugarcane.
Speaking of sugarcane molasses, the syrup extracted from sugarcane, nowhere else in Vietnam is it quite like the Northern region. Back then, before cement existed, sugarcane molasses was used as a construction material, playing a role similar to cement: mixed with sand and gravel to form a thick, viscous paste (fresh concrete) used to build drainage canals and cast flour mills. Admittedly, in the old days, there weren't as many tools or conveniences as there are now, so people were very careful in everything they did, producing good, sturdy goods. Just look at the square, sturdy pillars installed at the base of the irrigation ditches – meticulously and evenly constructed. The sand and gravel mixed with molasses formed a solid, hard mass, a dark brown or reddish-brown color. Even a strong sledgehammer couldn't break them. Even if floodwaters rose high and soaked the low-lying rice paddies for a long time, they wouldn't leak or break.
In my hometown, bánh lá (leaf-wrapped rice cake) is made from plain rice, filled with minced meat mixed with crushed dried onions, and wrapped in dong leaves or banana leaves. I've heard that in some villages, they select a type of fragrant, sticky rice (my father said it was milled from "lúa chim" or "lúa dắm" – special rice varieties once offered to the King), and with skillful steaming and boiling, the cakes, once cooked, can be peeled and even used to hit a round wooden pillar in the middle of the house without breaking or falling – truly incredibly sticky.
Inside the honey cake
The produce is simple, grown in the fields and gardens, yet indispensable during ancestral worship ceremonies or on the Tet holiday feast table. Simple, yet fragrant and wholesome, like the water from a deep well in the countryside. I remember back in my student days, a friend asked: "Why is your hometown so strange? Tet is the only time of year, and yet you still wrap the banh chung (traditional Vietnamese rice cake) with bone as the filling?"
Actually, boiling the pork bones all day makes them so soft they melt completely, making them less greasy and adding a sweet, fragrant flavor, while also increasing calcium intake. Besides, back in the day, when we were poor, we didn't have much meat. We could wrap the meat in pork rolls, make pork jelly, and use the leftover bones to make dumplings.
Similarly, the leaf-wrapped cakes, which resemble rice cakes or plow-shaped cakes but are more authentic and rustic, are now favored and considered a local specialty, especially with the abundance of meat and wine.
Upon closer inspection, the components of the leaf-wrapped cake are quite interesting. The cake is made from plain rice flour (Earth element), the filling is pork (Water element) mixed with finely chopped onions (Metal element) and pepper (Fire element), and it's wrapped in dong leaves (Wood element). It embodies the Five Elements in their interactions of creation and destruction. Simple, familiar, easy to make and eat, not a fancy delicacy, yet delicious and environmentally friendly.
The aroma of glutinous rice flour mixed with molasses, cooled and grilled over charcoal, blends with the familiar scent of banana leaves.
The elders of the past were truly learned!
Today I texted a friend, asking if they still make rice cakes in their hometown. Knowing that you're far from home in this coastal region and missing Thanh Hoa during the Thanh Minh festival – a time of year characteristic of these cakes – I sat gazing at the lotus pond in late spring, early summer, with a light drizzle still falling, watching the pot of rice cakes and the smoke rising from the kitchen fires in the fields. I felt a pang of nostalgia for my poor hometown and remembered my old friend...
