Soc Trang Pia Cakes

The bow of the boat has just left the open sea and turned into a wide river mouth in the south. The sea wind still blows hard at the travelers' backs. Ahead lies a vast stretch of water, with both banks still far away.

That river mouth is Mỹ Thanh, one of the places that welcomed people coming from across the sea. The boat heads upstream, along rivers and canals that grow narrower and narrower, the two banks drawing closer together. On board are people from the southern coast of China, seeking a way to make a living. Among them are Teochew people. In Sóc Trăng, people have long called them the Tiều. They are looking for a place where life is easier, usually somewhere with rivers and canals.

Then some of them go ashore and walk to a sandy ridge rising high in the middle of the fields. People call that place Vũng Thơm, about 10 kilometers from the center of Sóc Trăng. The first to arrive were ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese and Khmer people. Together they turned the empty ridge into a market hamlet, small but full of life.

On those boats, some people carried a cake from home. It began as the mooncake of the Teochew people, and in their language, pía means cake. Some Minh Hương Chinese brought that cake to Vietnam. In the old homeland, the cake was very different. The filling held roast duck, fermented bean curd, and lard or mutton fat. The crust was made of wheat or millet flour and baked over charcoal. After living a long time in the Mekong Delta, the Chinese community slowly changed the cake to suit Vietnamese tastes.

No one knows for sure which boat carried the first bánh pía. Some put the cake's age at several hundred years, counting from the day it came over with the Minh Hương. Others put it at about 100 years, counting from the time Vũng Thơm began to have bakeries.

On the sandy ridges of the Sóc Trăng countryside, Teochew families farmed dry upland fields. Many households kept up the craft of making foods from the old homeland, such as salted radish, cured sausage and bánh pía. In Vũng Thơm, Chinese families made cakes to eat and to sell to people around the area. The cakes turned up in small grocery shops, in drink stalls and at the market.

The very first cakes to come out of the ovens in Vũng Thơm had a filling of salted mustard greens. They were called bánh can xại. Next came bánh tàu xa lá, filled with mung beans, and bánh òn xa lá, filled with taro. Both also had candied fruit and fat mixed in.

The crust of a bánh pía starts as two lumps of dough, kneaded separately. The first is for the inner layer. The baker kneads tapioca starch and wheat flour with fat and water until the dough is very supple. Bakers call it oil dough. The second is water dough, kneaded from wheat flour and sugar with a little fat and water, until it is soft but not sticky. That dough will become the outermost coat, very thin.

The traditional filling calls for mung beans with their husks rubbed off. The baker soaks the beans overnight, cooks them, mashes them very fine, then mixes in sugar and finely diced pork fat. The can xại greens must be prepared well ahead, and only skilled bakers can make them. With their own hands, they wash fresh mustard greens, cut them up and dry them in the sun, taking care not to let them get too dry. They season the leaves with salt and sugar and add cloves and cinnamon. Then they let the leaves cure for a few weeks, until the flavors sink all the way in.

On baking day, the baker mixes the cured greens with diced candied winter melon, pork fat and salted egg yolk. Then the whole batch goes into the sweet mung beans, and the baker stirs until the two blend into one. That is the can xại filling.

Once both doughs are ready, the bakers pinch off balls of dough of equal size, called cat's eyes. Each one is rolled out into a round wrapper of many layers, slightly hollow in the middle to hold the filling. They set a ball of filling in the hollow, gather the edges together and pinch them tightly shut. Then they turn the seam underneath and press gently, so the cake is slightly flat.

In the old days, bakers set the cakes on trays and baked them for a while in a clay oven. They took the trays out and brushed the tops with melted fat mixed with egg yolk. Then the cakes went back into the oven a while longer. Each batch came out golden on top, with a red mark in the middle from a wooden stamp.

When the cake is baked, the paper-thin coat of water dough stays separate and does not stick to what lies inside. The whole crust is a stack of thin layers pressed close together, and they can be peeled off one at a time. That is why the cake has another, playful name. It is called bánh lột da, the cake whose skin peels off.

Long ago, fresh-baked cakes were wrapped in paper, folded and glued into square packets, four cakes to a packet. Some people still remember that the first cake out of the packet was the best. The other three met the air that slipped in, and their flavor slowly faded. Cakes in paper kept only a few days. So people made them only for holidays and for Tết, the Lunar New Year, or ate them as soon as they were made.

In Sóc Trăng, the full-moon night of the eighth lunar month is just not complete without bánh pía. The cake is an offering for the altar and a gift for others. For a long time it has carried wishes for good luck and for families coming together. Every year, as the Mid-Autumn Festival draws near, the bakeries come alive again, their ovens glowing red.

Then the cake had a journey of its own. Villagers say that more than half a century ago, a Chinese trader took bánh pía to sell around Lái Thiêu. Seeing how much durian grew there, he suggested that the bakers of Vũng Thơm make a durian filling. From then on, the villagers add, durian bánh pía became a favorite in many homes. Today there are cakes filled with mung bean or taro mixed with durian. There are cakes with salted egg, with lotus seed and with many other fillings.

Many bakeries in Vũng Thơm moved out to the national highway and slowly grew bigger. In many of them, machines now mix and knead the dough and portion out the filling. Boxed cakes now keep for two or three months, far longer than the paper packets of the past.

The cake that first came up the river on those boats is on the move again, traveling with shipments to faraway places. It goes as far as the United States and Japan, and on to Australia, Canada and many other places. Since 2020, the craft of making bánh pía in Sóc Trăng has been on Vietnam's national list of intangible cultural heritage.

Yet in a few long-established bakeries of Vũng Thơm, the can xại cake is still made entirely by hand, though it takes a great deal of work and skill. Some bakeries still wrap their cakes in paper, in memory of the cakes of old.

The paper wrapping comes off, and out comes a can xại cake, cooled all the way through. Its crust peels away one layer at a time. One layer is as thin as the wrapping paper itself. Another is as golden as the sandy ridge in the middle of the fields. Another curves like the side of the boat turning into the river mouth.

At the last layer, the can xại filling appears, mung beans blended with salted mustard greens, a little salty and a little sweet. It is the very first filling of Vũng Thơm.