Cau Ke Wax Coconut

Shake a coconut, and everyone expects to hear water sloshing inside. In Hòa Tân, some coconuts stay silent however long they are shaken.

From the outside, those silent coconuts look just like ordinary ones. They hang in the same cluster as ordinary coconuts, on the same tree, in the same garden. Looking up from the ground, hardly anyone could tell which fruit is which.

This coconut grows in Hòa Tân, in the land of Cầu Kè, where many Khmer families live. Cầu Kè used to belong to Trà Vinh province. Today it belongs to Vĩnh Long province. People call Cầu Kè the cradle of this coconut.

People in Hòa Tân call it dừa sáp, the wax coconut. Some call it the solid-hearted coconut, and some call it the cream coconut. Growers around here have also noticed that a wax coconut tree planted far from Hòa Tân no longer bears wax fruit.

This morning is harvest day in a coconut garden in Hòa Tân. The trader comes by the garden only about once every two weeks. This morning the trader climbs all the way up to the coconut clusters and flicks a fingertip against each fruit to pick out the wax ones. On trees grown the old way, a cluster usually holds only two or three wax coconuts, mixed in among the ordinary ones. When the picking is done, the trader climbs back down.

Around 1942, according to coconut growers in Hòa Tân, a monk brought a coconut variety from Cambodia and planted it. In their telling, that variety gave two trees that bore wax fruit. Later, one of the trees died. The surviving tree exchanged pollen with the coconut palms around it, and wax coconuts began to appear around Hòa Tân.

Other people in Cầu Kè give another account. According to them, the Venerable Thạch Sô planted the first two wax coconut trees at Chợ Pagoda. In their telling, wax coconuts have grown on this land for nearly a hundred years.

At the foot of the palms, the grower, who also owns the garden, picks up each freshly cut fruit and shakes it. An ordinary coconut sloshes when it is shaken. One that feels light and stays silent however long it is shaken is a solid one. A coconut that is solid all the way through is graded first class. One that is solid but still holds a little water in the middle is graded second class.

Before 2000, the sticky flesh of the wax coconut would not turn into candied coconut, however long it dried in the sun. It was also very rich, and people tired of it quickly. Many people cut down the wax coconut trees in their gardens.

From the early 2000s, more and more pilgrims came to the Khmer pagodas of Cầu Kè. Many of them wanted to taste the coconut that makes no sound when shaken. The wax coconut became a prized fruit, and growers began to plant it. Today a first-class solid coconut sells for many times the price of an ordinary one, and many gardens have had to be fenced in.

In 2024, Cầu Kè held a wax coconut festival during the week of Vu Lan, a Buddhist festival when people show gratitude to their parents. Cooking teams competed to make dishes from wax coconut. They made so many that the number of dishes was recognized as a Vietnamese record. There were cakes and salads, and there was chè, a Vietnamese sweet soup. There was curry, and there was even xôi, which is steamed sticky rice.

In the afternoon, some visitors drop by the garden. The owner splits open a first-class solid coconut and makes a few glasses of dừa dầm for the guests.

There is no water inside to pour into a glass. A thick layer of flesh, dense, sticky and white as cream, fills the whole inside. When an ordinary coconut grows old, its flesh turns hard and dry. The flesh of a wax coconut stays soft and rich.

The owner scoops the flesh into the glasses and adds sugar, milk and ice. After stirring it all together, the owner sprinkles a pinch of roasted peanuts on top. The glass of dừa dầm is sweet, rich and cool. Some people prefer it plain, with nothing mixed in, eaten in small spoonfuls to taste the gentle richness and light fragrance of the flesh.

There is a reason the flesh of a wax coconut is as soft as wax, so unlike the flesh of an ordinary coconut.

Every coconut is also a seed. Deep inside the fruit lies a tiny embryo, waiting to grow. The coconut flesh is the food the fruit stores up for that embryo.

The wax coconut came from the ordinary coconut and differs from it in just one place inside. In an ordinary coconut there is a substance far too small for the eye to see. It helps to picture that substance as a tiny helper. As the fruit ages, the helper slowly changes part of the food stored in the flesh. In a wax coconut, the helper cannot do its work. That part of the food keeps building up, to about five times as much as in an ordinary coconut. So the flesh turns soft and thick, like wax. Where a little water remains in the fruit, that water is thick too.

Out in the garden, the afternoon sun has begun to slant. The owner is still sitting there, shaking the remaining coconuts one by one, listening for the silent ones.

The flesh of a wax coconut also cannot feed the embryo. The embryo inside looks normal. It ought to grow something like a drinking straw, pushed into the flesh to draw up food. In a wax coconut, that straw cannot grow. The embryo and its store of soft food sit right next to each other, but they cannot connect. Put a wax coconut in the ground, and it will not grow into a tree on its own.

At Trà Vinh University, people spent about eight years finding a way to help that embryo. Researchers in the laboratory carefully lift the embryo out of the wax coconut and set it in a small glass tube. This time, the embryo does not have to reach the flesh. Its food is a nourishing liquid that the researchers mix in advance.

They move the embryo through three different nourishing liquids over about six or seven months. The embryo sends up a shoot, puts out roots, then puts out leaves. After that, they plant the young tree in soil and tend it for more than three months before handing it to the growers.

Around the fourth year after planting, a wax coconut tree starts to bear fruit. About a year later, its clusters hang heavy with coconuts. On trees grown the old way, the trader has to flick each fruit to find two or three wax coconuts in a cluster. On trees raised from an embryo in a glass tube, wax coconuts make up most of each cluster. In some gardens, eight or nine out of every ten coconuts are wax ones.

The sun has gone from the palm fronds. The owner lifts one more coconut and shakes it gently. It makes no sound. The owner splits it open. The flesh fills the whole inside, white and soft as wax.