Harrow Tooth Cakes of Thanh Hoa

A tooth that has never chewed a single bite once lent its name to a cake from Thanh Hóa.

It is not a human tooth. Nor is it a buffalo's tooth, though the buffalo always walks just in front of it. This tooth grows in no one's mouth. It grows from the underside of a wooden beam, and the only thing it knows how to bite is the soil of a rice field.

To meet it, go back to a rice field of long ago, just before planting season. The field has just been plowed. The soil lies turned up in big clods, lumpy all across the surface. A field like that is not ready for planting. Before the seedlings go in, it must become a layer of fine mud, flat and soft.

A farmer leads a water buffalo down into the field. Behind the buffalo comes a tool made of bamboo and wood. Two long bamboo poles form the shafts that link it to the animal. Behind them lies a sturdy wooden beam. Under that beam, a row of hard wooden teeth points straight down, as evenly spaced as the teeth of a giant comb. Each tooth is long and tapers toward its tip. In some places, the whole row of teeth is made of iron.

The farmer does not walk behind it but stands right up on the wooden beam. As the buffalo steps forward, the whole row of teeth bites into the mud and follows. The teeth tear the big clods into crumbs. The crumbs blend with the water into a layer of soft mud. Last season's rice stubble and the weeds are pushed deep down into it. Behind the farmer and the buffalo, the surface of the field slowly turns flat. Sometimes they must go back and forth many times before the field is fine enough for planting.

Farmers call this tool a harrow. The tooth that has never chewed is a harrow tooth, and the cake from Thanh Hóa bears exactly that name: bánh lá răng bừa, the harrow-tooth leaf cake.

Many places across Thanh Hóa make this cake. But whenever people mention it, they tend to think first of Xuân Lập commune, the land known as the home region of Emperor Lê Đại Hành. Within the commune, the craft gathers in the village of Trung Lập. In 2015, Trung Lập was recognized as a traditional craft village.

The village is busier than at any other time in the days just before Tết, the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. From early morning, every cake kitchen already has its fire glowing red. Everyone has a task. One wipes the leaves, one spreads the batter, one adds the filling, one ties the strings.

The work begins with plain rice. The cake makers soak the rice until it is very soft, then grind it into a wet batter.

The most important step is the pot of batter on the stove. The pot sits over a low flame. The cook steers a pair of big, long cooking chopsticks around the inside of the pot, stirring without pause, stirring with a very even hand. The batter thickens, growing denser and smoother, until not a single lump remains. If the fire is too high, the batter clumps and burns. If the fire is weak or the stirring uneven, the batter stays raw, and the steamed cakes turn mushy. How soft and supple the cakes become depends entirely on this pot. The cook lets the batter cool a little before it is used for wrapping.

Meanwhile, someone washes each banana leaf clean, then airs it until it is fully dry. An adult passes the leaves over a flame. The leaves soften, turn supple, and roll up easily. In Xuân Lập, every cake wears a coat of banana leaf, though some other places use dong leaves instead.

The filling in Xuân Lập is very simple. The woman who makes it fries dried shallots in fish sauce until they smell good. She mixes them into minced pork and sprinkles in a little black pepper. As for the batter, the cook seasons it with only a pinch of salt. Many places add wood ear mushrooms, and some mix in tapioca starch to make the cakes more supple. The people of Xuân Lập use only pork and shallots.

Now it is the wrapper's turn. The wrapper lays out a leaf, spreads a layer of batter over it, and sets a pinch of filling in the middle. The leaf is turned very gently, so the filling rolls up neatly inside and the body of the cake stays evenly round. Then the two ends are smoothed out thin, long and flat. One soft string is tied around it, and the cake is done.

One look at a freshly wrapped cake shows where the name comes from. The body is long and swells in the middle to hold the filling. The two ends taper and flatten, just like a harrow tooth narrowing toward its tip.

When the wrapping is finished, the cake makers stack the cakes in a steamer, and some households boil them instead. In the pot, the banana leaf dyes each cake a pale jade green and lends it the scent of the open fields.

Adults like to eat the cake while it is still warm, dipped in fish sauce with a little chili or black pepper. Each bite is soft without falling apart, and supple without sticking to the teeth. It tastes lighter and fresher than bánh chưng or bánh tét, which are made from sticky rice. A cake named after a tooth, it turns out, refuses to cling to any tooth at all.

At Tết and on death anniversaries, the green cakes are set on the ancestral altar. On festive days, they go onto the feast trays. On ordinary days, they join the meals of many families in Thanh Hóa, and they have become a familiar breakfast.

Cakes come with so many pretty names. It seems strange that anyone would name this one after a harrow.

Some say the name belongs to the rice fields themselves. Farmers, they say, treasure the harrow, because every planting season needs it. So when they made a dish from rice and saw that its shape looked like a harrow tooth, they simply named it after that familiar tool.

Others tell a story that links the cake to an emperor. The old histories do record a plowing by that emperor. In the spring of 987, Emperor Lê Đại Hành went down to plow the ritual field at Mount Đọi with his own hands for the first time, to encourage farming. But those lines of history say nothing about a cake.

The cake lives on in the village's telling. Legend has it that, to remember the emperor plowing the ritual field, the people of Xuân Lập took good rice and good pork and wrapped them into a cake shaped like a harrow tooth. Again by the village's account, they offered the cakes to the emperor at Tết and on festival days.

Right in the village of Trung Lập stands a temple to Emperor Lê Đại Hành. His real name was Lê Hoàn. Every year, the temple holds its festival on the anniversary of the emperor's death, the eighth day of the third lunar month. In 2023, that festival was recognized as a national intangible cultural heritage.

In some years, the festival includes a cake-making contest. The harrow-tooth cakes compete alongside bánh chưng nung and bánh gai. There is also a contest to prepare a vegetarian feast tray as an offering to the emperor.

The harrow tooth has never tasted a single bite of the cake that bears its name. It bites the mud so the clods break apart, so the stubble sinks down, so the field turns soft and flat, ready for the day the seedlings go in. Rice grows green on that layer of mud, comes into ear, ripens gold, and then goes home with the farmers. The paddy becomes rice, the rice becomes batter, and the batter comes to rest inside a green banana leaf.

By the time the soft string is tied, that handful of batter has swollen in the middle and flattened at both ends. Rice from the field the harrow tooth once bit now takes the very shape of that tooth.