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More on special Tet foods

Recipe for Tet eve

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When the Vietnamese celebrate Tet, they say "an Tet," literally "eat the Lunar New Year." During the festivities, which traditionally last a full month in Vietnam, food is a primary focus. But people actually take in the holiday with all their being. Tet is the most important event of the year, symbolizing rebirth, family, and relaxation. It is like Christmas, New Year, Easter, Thanksgiving, and Yom Kippur all bundled together.

Many overseas Vietnamese, nostalgic for days gone by, return to Vietnam to spend Tet with family and to pay respect to elders and ancestors. People are busy in the days before the first day of the New Year, known as Tet Nguyen Dan. They clean their homes and then decorate them, particularly with flowering branches of yellow hoa mai or pink hoa dao (similar to apricot, peach, and quince blossoms; see quince blossoms and hoa mai on right). Everyone shops for specialty items wrapped in auspicious red and gold packaging. Superstitions abound as people try to ensure good luck, prosperity, and happiness for the future. Among them is the belief that the first person to offer Tet greetings at your home will share his or her good fortune with you in the coming year.

At the center of the hubbub is the food, most of which is prepared in advance to allow people plenty of time for fun once the holiday begins. While regional differences exist, typical dishes include such rich meats as long-simmered kho made with pork or beef and various gio and cha sausages; pickled and preserved vegetables to cut their richness; and candies and sweetmeats to refresh the palate.

But regardless of the region, banh chung are always on the menu. The square sticky rice cakes are wrapped in banana leaf and boiled for up to twelve hours, depending on their size. Small ones measure four to five inches big and larger ones are the size of adobe bricks. The outer layer of rice becomes perfumed and tinted by the green leaf. Inside, the grains remain white and encase a buttery bean filling streaked with pepper and studded with chunks of lean pork and bits of its opaline fat. Banh chung may be eaten warm or at room temperature; they may also be fried up as crispy pancakes. (When the same ingredients are wrapped as cylindrical cakes, they are called banh tet.)

Aside from being tasty, banh chung touch the soul of Vietnamese people. The cakes are more humble expressions of gratitude for life's blessings than harbingers of good luck or great fortunes. After all, the few ingredients that go into the cakes are the basic foods that have sustained Vietnamese people for eons.

According to legend, the cakes were created during the golden era of the Hong Bang dynasty (theoretically from 2880 to 258 B.C.) when Viet civilization began. To pick his successor, King Hung Vuong VI held a food contest among his sons around the time of Tet. The prince who won cleverly used rice, the principle staple for Vietnamese people, to create banh chung, square-shaped to symbolize the Earth, and banh day made round like the sky. The idea and cooking instructions came from a genie that appeared to the prince in a dream. Upon trying the dishes and learning of the divine inspiration, the king was so impressed that he had the recipes distributed to people throughout his kingdom.

While both dishes are enjoyed throughout the year, it's banh chung that people make for Tet. The cakes are inexpensive to prepare and keep for a long time. For those practical reasons, Vietnamese families traditionally cooked up banh chung by the dozens so that they may be eaten during the month-long Tet festivities, when people were busy socializing, not slaving in the kitchen.

My parents revel in describing the sequence of events that went into making the cakes when they lived in Vietnam. Two days before Tet, the ingredients were gathered and readied. The next day, everybody from young to old got involved in wrapping and boiling the cakes, which lasted from early morning to late at night. The boiling was done outdoors in huge pots set over a wood, coal, or rice-straw fire. Since the moon barely shone on New Year's Eve, the pitch black night was lit by people's banh chung fires. Everyone eagerly anticipated their first tastes of the cakes, especially the children, some of whom slept by the fire. By the time the cakes were done, it was already the first day of the New Year, and the leaf-wrapped banh chung were quickly carried into the house, where they were prominently displayed to signal the start of the feast.