Banh Cay of Nguyen Village

About two months before Tết, Nguyễn village begins to smell sweet.

The nutty scent of roasting sesame and the warm smell of roasting peanuts mingle with sugary malt syrup and drift down every lane. These weeks before Tết are the busiest of the year. Tết is the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam.

Nguyễn village lies in what was once Thái Bình and is now part of Hưng Yên province. People here have made a sweet rice cake called bánh cáy for more than 200 years. From the name, it is easy to assume there must be cáy inside, a small creature related to the crab.

The scene shifts to the 18th century. On this same land there lived a young woman named Nguyễn Thị Tần.

In those days, the village still had another name, Nguyên Xá. She came from a family of learning. Her father was widely read. He had studied in many faraway places, and then he went on to serve as an official.

She was gentle and well mannered, and she knew a great many written characters, or so the village still says. That is why she was taken into the royal palace. There she taught court ritual and good conduct. She also cared for and taught the princesses and the other children and grandchildren of the emperor, as the village remembers it.

In Nguyễn village today, one batch of bánh cáy takes about 15 days to make. Curing the fat has to start very early. The bakers dice pork fat into small cubes, the size of pomegranate seeds. They mix the fat with sugar, then leave it to cure for about half a month.

Day after day, the cloudy white cubes slowly turn clear. By the end, each one is glassy and crunchy, with no greasy heaviness left at all.

Back in the palace in those days, according to the village elders, Lady Tần also made a cake. Hers was made from rice, sesame, sugar, ginger and dành dành, a fruit that dyes things yellow. At first that cake was called bánh Ngũ vị, the five-flavor cake.

When the cake was presented at court, that account goes, Emperor Lê Hiển Tông tasted it and praised it. He looked at its color and saw that it was the color of cáy eggs. So he gave the cake a new name. That is how bánh Ngũ vị became bánh cáy. In those days, cakes offered to the emperor were wrapped square and neat in deep red hồng điều paper.

The story is also told another way. In this version, she took what her home village produced and made a cake that would keep for a long time. Here both the emperor and the lord tasted it. Both men praised the sweetness of the malt syrup and the richness of the fat. They praised the crunch of the fried sticky rice and the warm bite of the ginger. And the name, this account also says, came from red and yellow woven together like cáy eggs.

An elder of the Nguyễn Công family, meanwhile, says that bánh cáy grew out of another cake, bánh chè lam. Three accounts, each one different, are still handed down to this day.

Then there is the rice. The bakers steam the sticky rice called nếp cái hoa vàng, then divide the batch into three parts. The first part stays white. The second is mixed with gấc fruit and turns a deep red. The last is mixed with the juice of dành dành fruit, and the white grains turn a glossy gold.

The craftsmen pound the three colors of sticky rice until smooth, roll it paper thin, and cut it into tiny bits. They dry the bits in the sun, then fry them. The dry grains puff up, light as air and crisp. The villagers call these puffed grains nẻ. White nẻ, red nẻ and yellow nẻ, all three colors, wait for their turn to go into the cake.

The cáy is a small creature related to the field crab, and it lives in brackish water. Yet there is no cáy meat in the cake at all. So the name must come from somewhere else.

Some say the red, yellow and white specks on top of the cake look like tiny cáy eggs. Others compare them to the color of a cáy shell once it is boiled. Still others say the strands of candied winter melon and the sesame seeds look like cáy eggs.

With the nẻ ready and the fat gone clear, it is time to cook the malt syrup. The cook simmers sugar with malt syrup, watching for just the right point. Cooked too little, the cake turns soft and molds easily. Cooked too long, it turns hard and burnt.

The pan of syrup is still blazing hot. The craftsmen tip in the nẻ, the fat, the ginger and the peanuts, and stir them evenly. Then they pack it all into wooden molds and press down hard to make it firm.

When the cake leaves the mold, each piece is both chewy and crunchy, both sweet and warming. Sometimes it also holds candied carrot and tangerine peel, for more color and more flavor. People praise bánh cáy as lục sắc bát vị, six colors and eight flavors.

Back then, the village says, Lady Tần brought the art of this cake home from the palace. The villagers were skillful and hardworking, and they learned very fast. From then on, bánh cáy was bound to the name of the village. And she was honored as the founding mother of the craft.

In her lifetime, she gave money and goods to help many people and many villages. When she died, her descendants brought her back to the village and built a tomb where they honor her. Nguyễn village and many other villages venerate her. Her good deeds were carved on a stone stele. Long afterward, later emperors still sent royal decrees to honor her merit.

Cake making here was once work for many farming families, done when the fields were quiet. In those slack seasons, they turned to steaming sticky rice and cooking malt syrup. The closer Tết comes, the more people take up cake making. Along National Highway 10, at the gateway to the former city of Thái Bình, many shops set out bánh cáy.

People eat bánh cáy most of all at Tết and in the cold days of winter. The ginger, sugar and sticky rice in it warm the body. On chilly days, grown-ups like to nibble bánh cáy with a pot of strong, hot green tea. The light bitterness of the tea softens the sweet richness of the cake. Children get their share of the cake, while the strong tea is kept for grandparents and parents.

As Tết draws near, kitchen after kitchen in Nguyễn village makes bánh cáy, and not one of them holds a single cáy. The little creature stays out in its brackish water, knowing nothing of it. Only its name, as the village tells it, came home with Lady Tần and stayed on in every batch.