-^-for posterity-^-

the 29th day of the last month of the lunar new year. one day before tet eve.

today i was invited over to a friend’s house to make different kinds of rice cakes that are very traditional for tet. it’s like being invited over to someone’s house to make christmas cookies.

the process of making ‘banh tet’ and ‘banh trung’ is extremely time consuming. making cookies takes, including going to the supermarket, mixing the dough, cooking and letting them rise, a couple of hours, maybe more. making tet cake and trung cake takes more than a day of solid labor. i only took part in the last stages of the process.

it all starts with the mother or one of the girls going to the market. they must buy green beans, rice, beans, palm leaves, banana leaves, rope made from banana trees, pork, salted eggs and probably some other things. this must be done two days before the tet cake and trung cake are actually put together. that night the mother must boil the green beans and make them into a kind of paste. the past has a similar consistency with pie dough, except it is a bit stickier. the green bean paste must sit and solidify. the next night the mother (or daughter) must prepare the sticky rice. i have no idea how this is done, i only know the final product is a mound of sticky, white grains of rice with mushy, red beans interspersed throughout.

after the two major ingredients are finished, the actual process of cooking the cake can begin.

i arrived at my friend’s house at 7 in the morning to find his father sitting on the front porch with a giant palm leaf at his feet. he was preparing the moulds for the tet cake. tet cake is much more popular in the north of vietnam and that is where he originated from. it is square in shape, about six inches across and an inch high. the outside of the cake is made out of a variety of leaves. he would cut leaves off of the branch, trim them down and fashion a perfect box using only toothpicks. i was impressed.

inside, the mother and the rest of the family was getting ready to prepare the center for the trung cake. the trung cake is more popular in the south and is shaped like a cylinder. it is about as long as a football and as thick as a soda can.

the inside of the trung cake are made from the green bean mash and bacon-like pork. they call it ‘three level pork’ because it has to have fat, meat and skin on it to taste good. you take the bean mush and ball it around in your hand. at first, i was not very willing to mush it too hard because i always remembered my mother scolding me when i played with the pie dough (‘play with it as little as possible so the crust is more flakey.’) well, they mashed it and ploughed it around with their hands until they had a baseball sized clump. then, they put it on a banana leaf and rolled it into a thin cylinder. they then spread the inside out, placed a long strip of bacon in the middle and rolled it up entirely. the bacon was completely concealed in the green bean mush. i did this a few times but was not very good at it.

the father was now finished with his tet cake boxes and we were to begin forming them. the first thing you do is take a banana leaf, wipe it with a rag and place it at the bottom of the box horizontally. then you place another leaf vertically making sure that they fit snugly. you place the last leave diagonally. it’s a little like making origami except that you will end up filling the origami with food and then will cook it for an entire afternoon over an open fire. a bit tedious.

the bottom layer is sticky rice. one bowl. you have to mash it down in the corners to make sure it’s a good foundation. the second layer is green bean mush which is flattened into small, square pancakes and is, once again, mashed into the corners. the third layer is a few big chunks of pork which are unceremoniously plopped in. the fourth layer is the green bean mush and the final layer is the sticky rice. you end up with an odd rice bean pork mixture wrapped in a nice, green origami box.

on top, you have to be careful to fold the banana leaves around the rice entirely to prevent water. you then wrap the whole thing up tightly with rope made from the banana leaf.

the trung cake is made in a slightly different way. the rice is plopped and made into a rectangle on a piece of banana leaf. the green bean cylinder is placed in the middle and the two sides are wrapped around it. when tying it off with the rope, you must put one end in your mouth, wrap it around the cake two times and pull as tightly as possible.

we made about 6 tet cakes (the square ones) and about 10 trung cakes. it took us the entire morning and, by the end, we were exhausted. i was in charge of making two trung cakes and we’ll see if they turn out. they’re still cooking.

before we had lunch, the father went outside and made a small fire in his front lawn. he put six bricks around the fire and we filled a large pan with the cakes and water. a fire was built and one of the sons was put in charge. he had to watch the fire and the pan all afternoon. it took about 5 hours to cook.

so, i made christmas cookies here except i found it to be a lot more time consuming. i wonder how a tradition like that would last in the states. who would spend two to three days preparing a pot of food? while i did spend an entire morning sitting around on a kitchen floor slowly preparing food, i also learned about the fascinating lives of five other people i probably would have never met in my life.