The Van Lang Meal

A very old menu lists four foods, and almost none comes with a way to cook it. First is ginger root, used in place of salt. Then comes mắm, made from birds, from beasts and from fish. Then a food made from the quang lang tree, and last, sticky rice. With so few words, the puzzle is which of the four a cook could make today.

That menu is really the last few lines of the tale of Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ, a sea dragon lord and a mountain princess of Vietnamese legend. The tale is Truyện Hồng Bàng thị, and it belongs to a book called Lĩnh Nam chích quái. This book of old tales is thought to date from the Trần dynasty. Those lines tell how people lived in the first days of the land of Văn Lang, when they did not yet have all the things they needed. They are legend, set down by later writers about a time long ago. No one who sat down to that meal wrote them.

Legend has it that around that meal, people raised their houses on wooden beams, high enough that tigers and wolves could not harm them. They wore clothes of tree bark and slept on mats woven from grass. A newborn baby lay on banana leaves. In those days there was no betel yet, and no areca either. Betel is an evergreen vine, and areca is a tall, slender palm whose nut is chewed wrapped in a betel leaf. When a marriage was proposed, the talk began with a parcel. One version of the book says it held salt. Another says it held earth. Only after that came the buffalo and the goat for the wedding.

Back to the menu. The faintest item on it is the ginger root. The old tale gives it a single sentence: people used ginger root in place of salt. Everyone has seen a ginger root, with its thin, earth-colored skin. Break it open, and a warm, sharp, peppery smell rises. But whether the ginger was sliced thin or pounded fine, when it went in, and how much, the tale does not say another word.

With mắm, the menu comes one step closer. Ginger in place of salt is only a way of seasoning, but mắm is a dish in its own right. Vietnamese kitchens still keep mắm today, rich and familiar. The difference is that the mắm in the old tale was made not only from fish, but also from birds and beasts. How it was cured, the book leaves blank.

The quang lang tree can still be seen today, because it still grows. The tale says people made food from the quang lang tree and from one other kind of tree. In Vietnamese, the quang lang is called cây đoác, a tree that looks like a coconut palm. There is starch in the core of its trunk. In some mountain places, people cut the tree just as it begins to flower. Then they pound the core of the trunk, filter out the starch, and dry it in the sun or over a fire. All of it is heavy work. Yet the old copies disagree on what the two trees became. One copy says cakes. Another says a kind of rice.

The clearest item is the last one. In the whole menu, only one sentence tells how to cook, and it is this one: the land had plenty of sticky rice, and people cooked it in bamboo tubes. That line is still legend. But that way of cooking lives on outside the book. In the kitchens of many ethnic groups in Vietnam today, people cook rice in bamboo tubes. That bamboo-tube rice has a well-known name, cơm lam.

The name comes from the language of the Thái people, from the words khảu lam. Khảu means rice. Lam means to burn, or to roast. Today, Vietnamese uses the name cơm lam for bamboo-tube rice made by any people in Vietnam. In the old days, Việt people in the midland hills of the Kinh Bắc region made cơm lam to eat in the forest, up in their hillside fields, or on long trips. In the past, Thái women who had just given birth often ate only cơm lam, because it was thought to be gentle on the stomach.

A tube of cơm lam begins in a clump of bamboo. Bamboo that is too young shrinks in the fire. Bamboo that is too old cracks. So the cook chooses a stem that is neither young nor old, which people call tre bánh tẻ. One end of the tube keeps its node, a solid wall that serves as the bottom. The other end is left open as the mouth. In the Kỳ Sơn area of Nghệ An province, the Hmong even match the tube to the rice. Ordinary rice is cooked in a tube of luồng bamboo. Sticky rice goes into a tube of nứa bamboo, lined inside with lá dong leaves. Most often it is sticky rice, soaked about half an hour, then put in the tube with water. Then the mouth of the tube is plugged, usually with fresh banana leaves or lá dong. Some Tày households plug it with guava leaves or lime leaves.

Tending the fire is done in more than one way. The Thái of Điện Biên heat the mouth of the tube first, then the body, then the bottom, so the rice inside packs down firm. The Khơ Mú of Sơn La set the tube a little away from the glowing coals, so the rice cooks slowly in the heat. Either way, the tube must be turned many times. Cơm lam is not easy to make. Some cooks have a good hand for it. Others end up with rice that is mushy, or cooked in some places and still raw in others.

Once it is done, the outer skin of the bamboo is shaved down, clean and thin, so the tube is easy to peel. Cơm lam is not eaten while it is still hot, either. At that point the thin skin inside the bamboo has not yet clung to the grains, and the rice tastes less good.

The ginger root, first on the menu, still has only those few words today. Ginger is close at hand in a Vietnamese kitchen, with its thin, earth-colored skin. How ginger once took the place of salt in the meal of the old tale is still a secret. It waits for someone to pick up a root, bring it close, breathe in that warm, sharp smell, and guess.