Dinh Bang Husband and Wife Cakes

Two square cakes press face to face, bound by a single red tie.

Lay the pair in your palm, and the first thing your skin meets is the dong leaf, green and cool. These cakes always come in pairs. No one ever ties up a single cake on its own. This is bánh phu thê, which some places also call bánh xu xê. Phu thê means husband and wife. A cake named for a husband and a wife. And that red tie holds more than one story.

The cake comes from the village of Đình Bảng, in Bắc Ninh province. The village is part of Từ Sơn. The village's old name was Kẻ Báng, because people once lived among wide forests of báng trees. In old Vietnamese, the word kẻ meant village. Whenever the emperors of the Lý dynasty came home to visit their native land, they would often retreat to the Báng forest to rest. The first story about the cake also begins with a Lý emperor.

People in Đình Bảng tell how, long ago, Emperor Lý Anh Tông had to go off to war. The emperor was far away. The empress stayed at home, missing her husband. She made cakes with her own hands, then sent them all the way to where the emperor was.

The emperor received the cakes and tasted one. They were sweet, nutty and fragrant, and lovely to look at too. He was deeply moved, for he understood the whole heart that had been sent along with every cake. Treasuring that bond between husband and wife, he named the cake bánh phu thê. From then on, Đình Bảng had its craft of cake making. Legend has it that the first of these cakes were made in Đình Bảng nearly 1,000 years ago.

That is one telling. Others say the cake makers were a young couple from the village. Once, Emperor Lý Thánh Tông and the empress came to the festival of Đô Temple. The villagers offered the good things of their land, and the couple offered their cakes. The emperor praised the taste and gave the cake the name phu thê.

Another story tells of the wife of a traveling merchant. Before he set off to trade far away, she made these cakes for him. She hoped that however far apart they were, her heart would turn toward him, as sweet and rich as the cake.

Or the name may be simpler. Two cakes laid face to face make a pair, so people called them phu thê, husband and wife. Which story came first is hard to know now. But every one of them turns on a pair, like the two cakes under this red tie.

Under the tie, the outermost layer is dong leaf, the same leaf that wraps the bánh chưng cakes of Tết. Tết is the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. Its stiff spine has been partly stripped away, so it wraps the cake gently. Beneath the dong leaf, pressed right against the cake, lies a leaf of the chuối tây banana. It has been boiled, aired dry, then brushed with a layer of fat. It must be chuối tây, never chuối tiêu. The banana leaf lets the cake peel away without sticking. But when the dough swells, a banana leaf tears easily. The dong leaf wraps the outside and keeps the cake neatly square. Even the leaves work in pairs.

With the last banana leaf peeled away, the cake appears. Its skin is golden and translucent, flecked with black sesame seeds. The skin is made from the glutinous rice called nếp cái hoa vàng, ground into flour. Only the finest part is strained out, pressed dry, then dried in the sun. Straining leaves less than half: only about four tenths of each kilogram of rice ends up as fine flour. That flour must then rest a full half month, 15 days, before it becomes cake. Use it right away, and the cakes fall apart.

A longtime cake maker in the village needs only to raise a handful of flour to the nose to tell sun-dried from machine-dried. Sun-dried flour smells less fragrant. Yet it is the one that makes a softer, tastier cake. Some households now use machines to mix the dough. But the cake makers still say no machine can replace a nose that knows its flour. Every house has its own secrets, so every house's cake tastes a little different.

The golden color of the skin does not come from a bottle of food dye. Instead, makers use dành dành, a plant whose fruit gives a yellow liquid. It is sun-dried, then soaked or simmered until the water turns gold, and that water is kneaded into the flour. Of all the steps, kneading the dough is the hardest. A drop too much water, and the cake turns mushy. A bite of the cake is both soft and crisp. The softness comes from the sticky rice. The crispness hides a secret few would guess: green papaya. Fine shreds of papaya, grated and soaked in alum water, lie hidden in the dough.

Inside the golden skin sits a round ball of filling. It holds steamed mung beans fluffed loose, white sugar, and bánh tẻ coconut meat, from coconuts neither young nor old. A touch of five-spice goes in too. With every bite, each flavor comes through on its own. At the four corners of the cake sit four lotus seeds, because the cake is usually cut into four.

Even the pot of beans for the filling has its own watcher. In one cake-making family in the village, someone came to the craft at just six years old. Back then the little boy only watched the pot of beans on the charcoal stove. The moment he saw steam rising, he ran to call the grown-ups. That little boy is now the fourth generation of his family to keep the craft.

The filling is round, yet the cake is square. The square mold is bent from a coconut leaf. The maker spreads the dough very thin over the mold and sets the filling at one end. Then the rest of the dough is folded over the top. The thin layer wraps around the filling, like the arms of a husband and wife sheltering each other. People liken that square and that circle to yin and yang. A square holding a circle, different from each other, yet a perfect fit.

Once wrapped, each cake is tied for now with a string of sticky-rice straw. Some households boil the cakes, and others steam them over water. In the old days, one family in the village boiled its cakes with no need for a clock. They lit a single stick of incense. When the incense burned out, the cakes were done.

Once cooked, the cakes are lifted out, pressed to drain, and left to cool. The straw string comes off. Two cakes are laid face to face and wrapped in one more layer of green dong leaf. Then the red tie is knotted. From that moment on, the two never go alone again.

Each season when the peach blossoms open, the people of Đình Bảng get busy making cakes, for their own homes and to send far and wide. Bánh phu thê is also one of the Tết cakes of northern Vietnam, especially in Bắc Ninh. In the land of Kinh Bắc, no betrothal or wedding is complete without these cakes. On the betrothal tray, the pair usually sits in a red paper box. Those two cakes tied together are a wish for the young couple: to stay true to each other and side by side for a long, long time.

Now the freshly tied pair rests in the palm again. On a plate, untied and unwrapped, one cake is cut into four and shared around. Every piece has a lotus seed at its corner. The plate now holds all five colors. There is the green of the leaf and the red of the tie. There is the yellow of dành dành and the bean filling, the white of the strained flour and the coconut meat, and the black of sesame. People liken those five colors to the five elements, a wish that heaven, earth and people live in harmony.

The red tie, just undone, lies at the edge of the plate, still curved in the loop that held the two cakes together.