Thanh Tri Rice Rolls

Over the mouth of a pot of boiling water, a white cloth is stretched as flat as a drumhead.

The cook pours a little rice batter onto the cloth and swirls it out very thin and even. Underneath, the water bubbles and churns. The milky white batter slowly cooks into a round sheet. Then a bamboo stick slips gently under its edge and lifts the whole sheet off the cloth.

The sheet is so thin that the face of a person behind it still shows through.

Thanh Trì is a village of bánh cuốn, steamed rice rolls. Here, sheets like this are made from early morning. The village lies beside the Red River, to the south of central Hanoi. Families who make rice rolls here are used to late nights and early mornings. The village has a short saying about the trade, easy to remember: fire red in the morning, money in the evening.

A sheet that thin is hard to make, and the trouble starts with the rice itself.

It is the same ordinary rice that families cook every day, but it must be chosen with great care. Rice that is too sticky gives a sheet that falls apart easily.

One longtime rice-roll maker in the village has her own way. After the harvest, she stores the grain for about six months, until its sap is gone, and only then has it milled into rice. In summer, she soaks the rice longer than in other seasons. She also grinds only as much batter as she needs, so that it does not turn sour.

Once the rice has soaked just long enough, it is ground. How much water to pour in is a secret each family keeps for itself. In the old days, the person grinding gripped the handle of a stone mill and turned it, round after round. The work was so heavy that only a really strong person could keep it up. Today, machines do the grinding instead. Some places still show the old way with a hand-turned stone mill, so visitors can watch and try grinding the batter.

Only batter ground very fine gives a sheet with a smooth, glossy face. If the batter is too thin, the sheet falls apart. If it is too thick, the sheet comes out thick and coarse to eat. One small slip of the hand, and the sheet turns too thick, tears, or loses its softness.

The fresh sheet, still steaming, is laid down beside the pot. At once, the helper standing there sprinkles on a few glistening shallots fried in lard. The shallot fat soaks into the white sheet, and its fragrance rises. Then the sheet is folded and placed on a round, flat tray of woven bamboo.

Sheet after sheet, the pile on the tray grows higher. The makers hope every piece will match the next, so that ten pieces look like one. A Thanh Trì sheet is round and folded. In the village of Thiết Trụ, the sheet is oval instead, and it is rolled up. Each village keeps a shape of its own.

When the tray is full, it is time for the rice rolls to go into the city.

The women of Thanh Trì carry the rolls all over the city to sell. The writer Thạch Lam once described sellers like these. Some carried a tray of rolls on their heads, others a pair of baskets on a shoulder pole, and all of them were quick and nimble. The smell of fresh rice batter and shallot fat followed them into the streets. A few even balanced whole baskets of rice rolls on their heads, calling out down every lane.

In the old days, the sellers walked all the way to Khâm Thiên Street. From a village beside the river, Thanh Trì rice rolls found their way into nearly every street and every little lane of Hanoi.

On a street corner, a seller sets her tray down. Eaten the old way, the roll has no filling. It is just a thin sheet touched with a little shallot fat. Today there are also rolls filled with minced meat and wood ear mushrooms, but the villagers still see the plain sheet as the root of their craft. With it comes a slice of cinnamon-scented meat loaf or a piece of golden fried tofu, plus a plate of fresh green herbs. And there must always be a bowl of dipping sauce.

The dipping sauce is mixed by an adult, and it takes a skilled hand. Fish sauce is very salty, so the person mixing it stirs in a little sugar to soften the taste. Then come a little water, a little vinegar, and a few slices of red chili. In Thanh Trì, the sauce is balanced so that it is not too sour, not too salty, and not too hot. It turns the color of amber, a clear gold like honey.

Long ago, a bowl of Thanh Trì dipping sauce also carried a faint scent all its own. The scent came from cà cuống, a giant water bug that lives in ponds, lakes, marshes and rice paddies. That fragrance is hard to find today. Yet the villagers still say that many places make rice rolls and soft rice sheets, but only Thanh Trì has a dipping sauce scented with cà cuống.

Even the pages of books have held on to that thin sheet. Writing about Hanoi, Thạch Lam praised Thanh Trì rice rolls as "thin as a sheet of paper and clear as silk." The writer Vũ Bằng never forgot how the sheet felt, soft and cool, and he put that memory into a book about the fine foods of Hanoi. In the years he had to live far from the city, he ate rice rolls at country markets. Yet in his heart, they never matched a sheet from Thanh Trì.

The war with France lasted nine years. In those years, seven out of every ten households in the village made rice rolls. Their loads traveled all over Hanoi, inside the city and out. Some of the sellers, moving through the streets, also quietly carried news for the resistance.

While the trays are out in the streets, the longtime maker back in the village remembers the old days. Back then, she made rice rolls only in the morning, as a side trade. When the batch was done, she went out to the fields.

In those days, the village fields lay on the flats along the Red River. After each flood season, the river laid a fresh layer of silt over the flats, as fine as flour. In that soil, the villagers grew corn, sweet potatoes and mulberry.

Even the village name carries the shape of water. The old name of this land was Thanh Đàm, a green marsh, and the later name Thanh Trì, a green pond, grew out of it.

One folk verse, easy to learn in a single hearing, sums up this whole land. It goes: Thanh Trì has its fine rice rolls, it has the mound of Ngũ Nhạc, it has the Red River. The two old names, Thanh Đàm and Ngũ Nhạc, live on as local street names. Today, eateries from Hanoi all the way to Ho Chi Minh City still sell Thanh Trì rice rolls. In 2025, the village craft of making rice rolls was added to Vietnam's national list of intangible cultural heritage.

As evening falls, the sellers return to the village one by one. They set out in the morning with full trays, and by evening the trays are lighter. It is just as the trade's saying goes: fire red in the morning, money in the evening.

The river flats beside the village slowly fade into the dusk. The village of rice rolls falls quiet.

Then tomorrow morning, over the mouth of the pot, the white cloth is stretched tight once more. The first sheet of the new day is lifted off, paper thin and perfectly clear. Behind it, once again, the face of someone from Thanh Trì shows faintly through.