Hoi An Banh To

The sweetness comes first. Rich and deep like honey, it lingers all through the mouth.

Then comes the chewiness. The piece is soft yet springy. Teeth sink in when they press down, and when they let go, the cake clings a little, not ready to part. It must be chewed very slowly.

Just when it seems over, a very faint warmth spreads at the back of the tongue. It is warm, but not spicy. The ginger comes last of all, quietly, like a guest who arrives late.

That bit of ginger went into the cake in the last days of the lunar year, in a kitchen in the Quảng region. In Hoi An, the old port town where Chinese and Vietnamese people live side by side, this brown cake is called bánh tổ.

In the old days, only a few people in Hoi An made bánh tổ to sell. Other families made their own at home, as an offering to their ancestors at Tết, the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam.

Early in the morning, before the fire is lit, a child brings the cook a stack of clean banana leaves. The leaves are still fresh and glossy green. Then the child goes out to the porch to sit and wait.

Bánh tổ needs sticky rice flour, sugar, ginger and sesame. The rice must be sticky and fragrant, with plump, even grains. The cook grinds it into flour and sifts it again and again, keeping only the finest part.

The sugar has a story of its own. Long ago, sugarcane molasses from the Quảng region was cooked down into a sugar called đường bát, and bakers used nothing else. This sugar made the cake taste good and keep a long time. Today, most bakers use golden granulated sugar. With white sugar, the finished cake turns a cloudy white, like milk.

On the stove, the sugar begins to cook down into syrup. It melts, bubbles gently, and slowly thickens. While waiting, the cook pounds a little fresh ginger and drops it into the pot for its scent.

As soon as the syrup is just right, the cook pours in the rice flour. Both hands beat and knead, steadily and without stopping, until flour and sugar blend into one. This beating of the dough is very hard work. The batch grows thicker by the moment, dragging at the arms.

But the hardest part is not strength. A little off, and the cake turns out too firm or too mushy. The cook has to judge the flour and the sugar so they meet at exactly the right point. People in the trade call this judging lấy trùng. Only those with many years in the craft can find that point for sure.

Now come the banana leaves the child brought in that morning. The cook folds the leaves into a cup, like the cup of a flower turned upward, and pins the rim with a few sharpened bamboo sticks so the leaves stand firm. After spooning the dough into the cup, the cook sets the whole leaf cup inside a woven bamboo basket, so the cake keeps its shape as it cooks.

The baskets are set on bamboo racks, stacked in layers inside a very large pot. Then the cook steams them for a long time, many hours on end. The cook watches the pot so the tops of the cakes stay smooth, with no pits. The hot steam wraps the banana leaves, and their fragrance rises and drifts all the way out to the porch, where the child is still waiting.

After steaming, the cook lifts out the cakes, scatters a layer of toasted sesame over the tops, and lets them cool slowly. Each cake is now a deep brown, the color of the soil in the rice fields, dotted with tiny sesame seeds.

On the 23rd day of the last lunar month, the Kitchen God Ông Táo goes back to heaven, and people in Hoi An still often choose bánh tổ as his offering. The Chinese community of Hoi An believes his offering tray should hold something sweet and something sticky. They hope that when he reports to the Jade Emperor, he will go easy and pass over the small faults of the household.

Some households put the finished cakes carefully away, and no one touches them. Only at the stroke of the New Year are the first slices cut and offered to heaven and earth and to the ancestors.

Then Tết arrives. On the ancestral altars of Hoi An, the brown cake sits beside two other New Year cakes, bánh tét and bánh in. For a long time, the altar there has not been complete without the brown cake. Among all the Tết cakes of Hoi An, it ranks first.

In the Quảng region, people believe that Tết is when the family's departed elders come home to be with their children and grandchildren. Every dish at Tết must be offered to the ancestors first, and only then does the family eat. Because bánh tổ keeps so well, it can stay on the altar through the days of Tết and still taste good when taken down.

Some people say the cake on the altar was made to look like a nest. In Vietnamese a nest is a tổ, and so the cake is called bánh tổ. Others say the cake is offered to the ancestors, tổ tiên in Vietnamese, on great occasions, hence the name. An old saying goes with the cake: birds have their nests, and people have their lineage. Just as a bird has a nest to return to, people have their grandparents and ancestors to remember.

In Chinese, this New Year cake has a name of its own, which Vietnamese people read as niên cao. The name sounds like a year growing bigger, like a wish that the new year will be better than the last. When guests visit at Tết, some Chinese households even wrap up a cake for them to take home.

Even today, no record is firm enough to say when bánh tổ first came to Hoi An, or where it came from.

Researchers think the cake may come from a basket-steamed cake of the Minh Hương Chinese, who came to live in Hoi An around the 17th century.

An old tale tells of Mother Âu Cơ, a mountain princess of Vietnamese legend. On the day her children parted to go up into the mountains, she made this cake for them to carry and eat along the long road.

Still others believe the cake may have been made by people who came from far away to settle in a new land, because they missed their ancestral homeland.

After Tết, the cake is eaten in many ways. Some people slice it and eat it right away. Other households set it out in the sun to dry hard, so it will not go moldy. Many people in the Quảng region like to store the cake for a while before frying it.

The cook slips the slices one by one into a pan of hot peanut oil. Each slice puffs up, crisp outside and soft inside, and a rich fragrance fills the kitchen. With a few pieces of grilled rice cracker on the side, it is even better. The child sits at the table in the main room, waiting for a slice to cool completely. Only then does the child take small bites, chewing very slowly.

Many places in the Quảng region make bánh tổ, but the Hoi An cake is a favorite. It is sold not only in town but also carried to Da Nang and Tam Kỳ. The cake travels farther still. In early spring, students living away from home often save a few cakes to bring their friends as gifts. One mother wraps bánh tổ in small parcels and sends them to her child, who is studying far away in Saigon. People from the Quảng region who live far from home still miss that brown cake when Tết comes.

It is the same piece of cake. Sweetness first. Then the chewiness, at exactly the right point the cook judged in the last days of the old year.

Just when the piece seems to be gone, the late guest finally arrives: a little warmth of ginger. The name niên cao sounds like a year growing bigger. The new year arrives the same way, last of all, gentle, yet warm.