Cu Lao Cham Ramie Leaf Cakes

One cake. Two. Three. Four. Five.

One person's ten fingers can count only ten cakes. Counting about 450 on fingers would take the fingers of 45 people.

The things being counted are cakes, small ones wrapped in banana leaf, each folded into a four-sided pyramid. Rows of them sit on flat bamboo trays in a home kitchen. These are bánh ít lá gai, ramie leaf cakes. The home is on the island of Cù Lao Chàm, off the coast of Hoi An.

Cake makers on the island often follow a familiar recipe: 3 kilograms of sticky rice flour, the same weight of ramie leaves, and some mung beans and sugar. That makes about 450 cakes. With as much leaf as flour, the whole dough takes on the color of the leaves.

That is a lot of cakes. Eaten one a day, they would last more than a year. But bánh ít keeps for only about two or three days, so it takes many people eating together to finish them in time. Today most of the cakes are made for sale, to islanders and to visitors from far away.

There is something funny here. An old folk riddle teases exactly this point, asking why cakes that fill a whole tray are called bánh ít. In Vietnamese, ít means a little, or few.

Some say the cake is made of many things, with only a little of each. A little of this, a little of that, and together they make bánh ít.

Others tell a folk tale. Long ago, a young wife bought two cakes for her mother-in-law every time she went to market. People praised her. Few daughters-in-law, they said, remembered to buy cakes for their mothers-in-law so faithfully. From then on, that cake was called bánh ít.

Still others tell a different folk tale, set in the time of the Hùng Kings, whom Vietnamese people honor as their ancestors. A youngest daughter made a small new kind of cake, and people called it bánh nàng Út, the youngest daughter's cake. Said over and over, Út slowly slid into Ít.

Three tellings, all fun to hear, and no one yet knows which is right. Most cake makers on the island cannot explain the name either. The cakes stay many, and the name stays few.

In earlier times, bánh ít lá gai was a cake for Tết, the Lunar New Year. At Tết, most households on the island made it alongside other cakes. There was bánh tét, and there was bánh in. There were popped rice cakes, and bánh thuẫn too. The cakes were offered to the ancestors first, then shared through the days of Tết.

It is hard to say when this cake came to the island. Few people ever wrote down how it was made. The old people's memories reach back only to about the early 20th century, and even that is only a maybe.

Back then, every step was done by hand. The ramie leaves were pounded in a stone mortar, the wooden pestle thudding down again and again. Fewer cakes were made than today, but they were delicious.

The sticky rice was three-month rice, a fragrant sticky rice grown right on Cù Lao Chàm. Banana leaves grew on the island too. The syrup was cooked from a golden cane sugar called đường táng. It came from Quế Sơn and Đại Lộc, on the mainland.

Now no one on the island grows sticky rice, so the cake makers have to buy it. With so many cakes to make, there are not enough banana leaves, so more are bought and brought out by boat from Hoi An. The syrup is now made with golden granulated sugar.

Ramie is different. Most cake makers grow their own and buy more only when they run short. It grows around the garden and in front of the house. It was once planted on the hillsides too, but the cows ate it all, so it is no longer grown there. Ramie is very easy to grow. A cutting pushed into the ground takes root, and after the leaves are cut, the grower simply waits for the next crop.

A cake maker comes home with ramie leaves she has picked. Each leaf is dark green on top and white underneath, thick with white hairs, its edge toothed like a saw. She pinches off every stalk. When leaves were pounded by hand, the stiff rib down the middle had to be stripped out too. She washes the leaves and boils them for a very long time, hours on end. Then she wrings them dry and grinds them very fine. The finer the leaves, the better the cake.

Next she cooks sugar into a thick syrup that ripples in the pot and pours it over the ground leaves, then adds the sticky rice flour. Now the kneading hands decide whether the cake will be good. She kneads on and on, until leaf, sugar and flour blend into one. The dough clings thick and sticky to her hands, then slowly turns smooth and glossy. Kneaded too little, the cake comes out lumpy, neither smooth nor glossy.

As for the mung beans, she soaks them and rinses them clean. She cooks them until the water boils, drains them, and steams them until they are cooked and dry. She pounds the beans in the stone mortar and adds sugar, and the wooden pestle thuds again. She stirs the beans in a pan over the fire until they are completely dry. Then she rolls them into small round balls of bright yellow.

At wrapping time, the banana leaves rustle under her hands. She lays out two pieces of leaf, the smaller inside and the larger outside, their tips pointing opposite ways. She rubs a little oil on the inner face so the cake will not stick. She pinches off a handful of dough, spreads it thin, sets a bean ball on it and rolls it round. She sets it in the middle of the leaf and folds the leaf up into a four-sided pyramid. One done, she reaches for two more pieces of leaf.

It looks easy, but not everyone can do it. On the island, string tells the cakes apart. A cake tied with string is bánh su sê, and one without is bánh ít.

She sets the cakes in a basket inside a big pot. As the pot goes on the fire, she lights a stick of incense. A thin thread of smoke curls up as the stick burns down. When only its bare stem is left, the cakes are done.

She lifts them out quickly and leaves them where the breeze can dry the leaves. Only when they are completely cool does she peel off the banana leaf. The skin is a deep green, almost black, smooth and glossy. At the first small bite, the golden bean filling shows inside the dark shell. Chewed slowly, the cake is soft, sticky and only lightly sweet. Then come the gentle chew of the ramie and the rich, nutty scent of the mung beans.

Over time, fewer households made their own cakes, yet people still wanted to buy them, and so bánh ít became a trade. Islanders bought them for death anniversary offerings and simply to eat. Crews of fishing boats bought them, and so did passengers on the ferries that called at the island. Then tourists came in growing numbers, and the bánh ít lá gai of Cù Lao Chàm became the island's well-known specialty.

Since then, visitors stepping onto the pier find baskets of cakes for sale right there. The small cakes are wrapped by hand, plain, yet with clean, sharp corners, and they sit in bamboo baskets. They are sold in paper bags made from old newspaper. Even people from Hoi An on the mainland buy them as gifts. It was once a Tết cake. Now the cake makers' busiest season is summer, when the island fills with visitors.

About 450 cakes means a pair of hands doing the same work about 450 times. Two pieces of leaf laid out. A handful of dough spread thin. A bean ball set in the middle. Four sides folded up. One cake. Then one more.

On the island, some elderly women learned the craft by following their mothers' hands. Before them, those mothers folded the four sides of the banana leaf in the same way, wrapping cakes for the ancestors' offering tray at Tết.