Floating Cakes of Han Thuc Day

The sticky rice lies soaking in a basin of water all through the second day of the third lunar month. The cloudy white grains lie still at the bottom. Tomorrow is the third, the festival that many people simply call the festival of bánh trôi and bánh chay.

In the villages, families who make their own offering cakes begin the festival today, and it lasts until the end of tomorrow. The rice in the basin is nếp cái hoa vàng, a kind of glutinous rice, and some families mix in a little ordinary rice. This festival is kept most of all in the north of Vietnam.

On the evening of the second, the rice is finally ground. Ground while the grains still hold their water, it becomes fresh glutinous rice flour. The flour is soft and sticky, with a faint sour smell from the soaking. Just ground, it is still dripping wet.

The wet flour is poured into a cloth bag, and the bag is hung up. All night, while the house sleeps, the water slowly drips out.

On the morning of the third, the bag is taken down. The mothers turn the flour out onto a tray. It has drained overnight, yet it keeps all the softness and stickiness of fresh flour.

Beside the tray of flour lies a slab of đường phên, brown sugar pressed into slabs. Good đường phên is a reddish brown, hard and crisp, with a cool, clean fragrance. As they shape the cakes, the mothers chop the sugar into small, even pieces. That way the cakes are not too sweet, and the sugar melts just enough in the boiling.

To make bánh trôi, they pinch off a bit of dough, press a piece of sugar into the middle, close the dough over it and roll it round. The little cake is pure white, hiding a piece of brown sugar inside.

Bánh chay comes from the same tray of dough, but it is bigger. Its filling is cooked mung beans, mixed with sugar and coconut. Each one is shaped into a ball, then pressed gently flat. Some elderly women even roll the bean filling into balls no bigger than a thumb tip.

The children have their own work too. The smallest child sits close beside the parents, rolling tiny bánh trôi from a handful of dough that is soft and cool in the hand.

On the stove, the pot of water is already boiling. Dropping the cakes in and lifting them out is work for the grown-ups, and the children stay by the dough. The bánh trôi go in and sink straight to the bottom of the pot. After a while, one by one, they rise and drift lazily on the surface. Bánh trôi means floating cake, and these cakes truly float.

An old saying goes: three times sinking, seven times floating, nine times drifting. When the cakes drift on the surface, they are cooked. Seeing them float, the grown-ups lower the flame, because water boiling too hard will break the cakes. In the old days, watching the cakes sink and rise was a small pleasure for the grown-ups at the stove. That sinking and floating even found its way into poetry, in a line by Hồ Xuân Hương. She was a Vietnamese poet of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Her line about the bánh trôi says: floating seven times, sinking three, with the waters and the hills. In his book Đất lề quê thói, the writer Nhất Thanh took that line as his starting point and called the two cakes poetic cakes. To him, they were cakes that had become poetry.

The cakes lifted from the pot go into a bowl of boiled water left to cool, so they firm up. Only then are they arranged on plates. Toasted sesame seeds are dotted onto each one, with a fingertip or with the tip of a big chopstick dipped in water.

By late morning, the pot is still steaming. In that steam, the day's other name sounds curious: Tết Hàn thực. Hàn thực is written with two Chinese characters that mean eating cold food. The custom first came from China. Long ago there, people honored a virtuous man named Giới Tử Thôi with three days of lighting no fires, eating only food cooked beforehand and left to cool.

In 1915, the writings of Phan Kế Bính on Vietnamese customs were printed as a book. He wrote that the Vietnamese followed that custom and kept the festival on the third, but made bánh trôi and bánh chay in place of cold food. The cakes were offered only to the family's ancestors, and no one gave a thought to Giới Tử Thôi. The name means eating cold, and yet no household refrained from cooking. This morning's kitchen is the same. The cakes come out of boiling water, and only then cool off.

In town it is different. The festival fits into two or three hours on the morning of the third, or of the second for families who make their offering early. Many families buy ready-made cakes from street vendors, who carry them on shoulder poles every day. But on this day, people crowd around the vendors' loads, row upon row, waiting to buy from early morning.

Nowadays some people tint the dough with natural colors. Red comes from gấc fruit, green from tea, and there are purple and orange as well. These are bánh trôi ngũ sắc, five-colored floating cakes, in many colors but still made the old way. In kindergarten classes, shaping bánh trôi and bánh chay has even become a lesson for the little ones.

In the village kitchen, the children hurry about with plates and bowls, setting the cakes on the tray. By noon, the bánh trôi lie neatly on their plates. Some plates also have a few pomelo blossoms set beside the cakes. The bánh chay sit in small bowls, two big ones or three small ones to a bowl. Kudzu starch is stirred with sugar into a thick, clear syrup scented with pomelo blossom, and poured over the bánh chay. Some families make a ginger syrup instead. A few sesame seeds are scattered on top, and some families add a little grated coconut. A few steamed mung beans are sprinkled here and there, like tiny blossoms fallen from an areca palm.

The offering tray holds incense, flowers, and betel and areca, with plates of bánh trôi and three or five bowls of bánh chay. Betel is an evergreen vine, and areca is a tall, slender palm whose nut is chewed wrapped in a betel leaf. Then the incense smoke rises. In every house in the hamlet, incense smoke curls up thick. The incense is lit to remember the ancestors. The cakes, made from the grains of the harvest, are offered up with a wish for timely rain, gentle wind and a good rice crop.

On the tray, the two white cakes sit side by side. A modern researcher looked at them and thought of the mother Âu Cơ, a mountain princess of Vietnamese legend. The legend tells of her hundred eggs. In that researcher's view, bánh trôi is like the 50 children who followed their mother up into the mountains. Bánh chay is like the 50 children who followed their father down to the sea. Their father was Lạc Long Quân, a sea dragon lord of Vietnamese legend. This is a modern way of seeing them, not a tale handed down from old times.

In the early afternoon, with the rites over, the tray is taken down. The whole family gathers close, heads together over the cakes. The cakes have cooled, soft and fresh. Bánh trôi is eaten in small bites, its sugar melted just enough. The kudzu syrup on the bánh chay is thick and gently sweet, with a hint of pomelo blossom. The writer Nhất Thanh also spoke of that coolness, but in a different way. To him, these were cakes eaten to cool the heart as the summer sun arrives. They had nothing to do with the cold food day in China. Some understand it one way, some another. To this day, no one knows for sure why this day belongs to bánh trôi and bánh chay.

By evening, the house is quiet again. The pot on the stove has gone cold. Yesterday's rice-soaking basin has been washed clean and turned upside down beside the stove, still beaded with a few drops of water.