Cham Ginger Cakes

Seen from one end, it looks like a crab claw raised in the air. Seen from the other end, it looks like a ginger root just pulled from the bed, knobbly and plump. Its body is a shiny golden yellow, wrapped in a thin white coat.

A crab ought to scuttle sideways. This thing goes nowhere. A ginger root ought to lie in the soil. This thing has not a single grain of earth on it. On festival days, in the Cham villages of the south-central coast, people set it in a place of great honor. That place is the altar.

On the altar stands a round pillar of wood or clay, covered with colored paper. Small bamboo sticks are pushed in all around it. At the tip of each stick is pinned something that looks like a crab claw and a ginger root at once. The pillar stands there like a small tree heavy with golden fruit. Beside it are other cakes, bánh tét and bánh gang tay. Bánh tét is a cylindrical cake of sticky rice, wrapped in banana leaves.

This thing, half crab claw and half ginger root, can be eaten. It is a cake.

In Vietnamese it is called bánh gừng, which means ginger cake. In their own language, the Cham call it ginrong laya. The name splits in two, just like the cake. The first half, ginrong, means a claw, like the claw of a crab. The second half, laya, means ginger root. The name alone describes the shape.

The cake has a second name too, and it sounds nothing like a crab or like ginger. That name comes with a whole story. But first, the cake has to be made.

A Cham woman in Tịnh Mỹ says that among the traditional cakes of the Cham, none takes as much care and time as bánh gừng. In Cham villages such as Tịnh Mỹ and Ma Lâm, women still make it. And in the former Ninh Thuận province, now part of Khánh Hòa, people say that every Cham woman knows how.

In some villages, the cakes are made once a year, as a whole-village task. The women shape the cakes, but everyone lends a hand. One person picks the sticky rice, another pounds the flour, and another cooks the sugar syrup.

The rice picker looks closely at every handful. The sticky rice must be fragrant, large-grained and white, without a single broken grain. Then the pounder pounds it into flour and spreads the flour out in the sun until it is completely dry.

On cake-making day, boiling water is poured over the dry flour to make it soft and easy to shape. Someone cracks eggs and beats them until they foam with tiny bubbles. The flour goes into the eggs, with fresh ginger, sugar and a little rice-wine yeast. The amounts of egg and sugar differ from one household to the next.

The women knead the dough with great care, because the secret lies in the kneading. The dough must be very smooth and supple, with no trace of the raw smell of egg. Then they put it in a small mortar and pound it. Thump, thump, thump, thump. After that, they divide the dough into small portions.

Now comes the shaping, where the craft of Cham women shows most clearly. Each woman takes a small lump of dough and shapes it entirely by hand into a ginger root. Now and then she picks up a small knife or a small spoon to add a detail. Every cake is shaped by hand, so on the tray no two are alike.

These days, among the ginger roots, a little fish or a sprig of coral sometimes appears. There may be a decorative pattern, or a lucky symbol, also shaped by the women's hands. But across the whole tray, the ginger roots still outnumber the rest.

In the village there are old women who have made these cakes for more than half a century. One of them still tells the young women of her family line to remember how the cakes are made. It is the craft handed down to them by grandmothers and mothers.

The pan of oil on the stove is hot now. The woman at the pan drops in crushed garlic so the oil gives off a fragrant smell, then lowers in the cakes one by one. The oil sizzles. With a pair of chopsticks and a spatula, she presses gently on both sides of each cake to keep its shape. Slowly the cakes cook through, turning a shiny gold, firm and crisp.

At the other stove, the syrup maker has finished a pot of sugar syrup cooked with fresh ginger. The cakes go straight into the syrup while still hot, to make them glossy and smooth. Then they are laid out on trays in a breezy spot. The sugar slowly dries into a thin white coat, which makes the cakes crisper and helps them keep longer.

Once the cakes are dry and cool, every bite gives a crisp crunch. Sweetness comes first, then the scent of ginger rises, warm, with a slight bite at the tip of the tongue.

The women pin each cake onto a bamboo stick, push the sticks into the round pillar, and carry it up to the altar. This tree of cakes stands there through the days of Katê. That is when the Cham who follow the Bàlamôn faith hold their biggest festival of the year, giving thanks to the kings of old and to their ancestors. Bàlamôn is a Cham Hindu tradition. During the festival, there is one day when each family makes offerings to its ancestors in its own home.

At Katê, as at weddings, bánh gừng is placed above everything else, in the highest spot on the ancestral altar. All the other cakes sit lower. The descendants offer the cakes to their ancestors and pray for a life of plenty and happiness. They also pray for timely rain and gentle wind, and for good harvests.

The Cham hold that at a wedding, each kind of cake carries a meaning. Bánh tét stands for the groom. Another kind of cake stands for the bride. And bánh gừng binds the two together, so that yin and yang are in harmony. This cake, half claw and half ginger, speaks of a husband and wife who stay faithful, loving each other with one heart.

That faithfulness leads to the second name of the cake, bánh giận hờn. Giận hờn means sulking. The name goes with an old story that the Cham tell one another.

Long ago, the story goes, there was a wife whose husband had gone far away on the sea. Day after day, full of love, she longed for him to come home. She made bánh gừng. Every evening she carried the cakes down to the beach and set them one by one on the water for the waves to carry off. She asked the fish and the shrimp to take the cakes to her husband, along with her wish that he would soon come home.

Evening after evening she sent the cakes out, but her husband still did not come back. She sat on a rock by the shore and waited. She waited and waited, loving him all the while, until she turned into stone. Her cakes turned into coral too, in many shapes and many colors, on the seabed off Cà Ná.

One end raises a claw like a crab. The other end is knobbly like ginger. The third shape only appears when the Cham tell the story. Under the sea at Cà Ná, in the telling, her cakes turned into coral. On the shore, the women shape coral back into cakes.