Thi Cam Rice Cooking Contest

To the right of the communal house of Thị Cấm village stands a small army camp built of bamboo and leaves. It sits neatly by the courtyard, yet not one soldier is inside. On the morning of the eighth day of the first lunar month, the camp waits in silence. It has work only when the drum opens the contest.

Thị Cấm village was once called Hương Canh. Today it lies in Xuân Phương ward, Hanoi. Every year, on the eighth day of the first lunar month, the courtyard of the communal house holds a rice cooking contest. The teams compete to cook the best pot of rice. In 2021, the village festival was entered on the national list of intangible cultural heritage.

In truth, the festival begins the day before. On the morning of the seventh, the village elders open the doors of the communal house, and in the afternoon they hold a ceremony. Then, on the morning of the eighth, the elderly women offer incense before the altar.

At about ten o'clock, the courtyard starts to stir. People carry out stone mortars, stand wooden pestles beside them, and bring in armfuls of golden straw. A few people sit twisting the straw into round rings and set them under the mortars. Propped on the straw rings, the stone mortars stand firm.

Thousands of people come to the festival, villagers and visitors from far away. They range from white-haired elders to small children. The grown-ups stand packed around the courtyard.

Long ago, the whole village was divided into four quarters. Each quarter sends a team of about ten people, men and women together, and each team has its own color. In the old days, every team member had to be unmarried. Now the village asks only that they be healthy, and that no one in their household be in mourning.

Before the contest, the teams and villagers light incense for the guardian spirit of the village. He is General Phan Tây Nhạc, whom the village worships in its communal house.

Legend says he lived in the time of the eighteenth of the Hùng Kings, whom Vietnamese people honor as their ancestors. He was a strong general, skilled in both letters and arms. The king put him at the head of an army and sent him to drive off an enemy.

There are different tellings of how the cooking contest began. Some say that when his army passed through the land of Hương Canh, the villagers asked to join it. So he held a contest to choose the people best at feeding the whole army. Others say the contest took place inside the army itself, with prizes, because soldiers on the march had to eat on time.

The village story goes on to say that after that campaign, he stayed on in the village. One version says he taught the people to grow rice and weave cloth. Another says he and his wife, Lady Hoa Dung, taught them to plant mulberry, raise silkworms and weave on the loom. When he died, the villagers worshipped him as their guardian spirit. They chose the eighth day of the first lunar month for his festival.

After the incense, the rules of the contest ring out across the courtyard. Each team comes forward to draw lots. The lots decide which rice, pestle, mortar and pot each team gets. Each team receives exactly one kilogram of unhusked rice, all of the same kind. No one has an advantage. Only skill makes the difference. The whole contest fits into about an hour. Inside the bamboo camp to the right of the communal house, each team already has a child aged 12 to 14 waiting.

At about eleven o'clock, the drum booms out. The contest begins.

In front of the communal house, the strong young men of each team take their places to make fire. Beside them lie a tangled wad of straw for tinder, a bamboo bar, and a few tough, supple cords of giang. Fire is their job, in front of the whole village. Then they pull the cords, back and forth, back and forth, without a pause.

Cheers rise around the courtyard in waves. Then, from one wad of tinder, a thin thread of smoke curls up. The young men blow on it, and the smoke bursts into flame. The team that gets smoke and fire first wins this part. Once they have fire, the young men carry the flame to their team's cooking spot.

At the same moment, the empty camp goes to work. As soon as the drum sounds, the children dash out of the bamboo camp. They run to the sacred well of the village shrine, toward the Nhuệ River. With their jars full, they run back. Speed alone is not enough. The jar must still be full when it arrives. The child who first brings back a full jar wins the water race for the team.

At the mortars, the wooden pestles are pounding too. Team members take turns lifting the pestle, thump, thump, thump. Little by little, the husks come off the grain. Some winnow and some sift, so the chaff blows away. Then they pour the rice back into the mortar and pound again, until the grains turn white. One person picks out every bit of grit. Another takes the rice away to wash it clean.

The cooks are the most skillful women on each team. The rice goes into the pot, the pot goes onto the fire, and the water bubbles. When the water in the pot has nearly boiled away, the cooks lift the pot off. They cover its mouth with a piece of cloth and a layer of paper to keep the ash out. Then they bury the pot in a heap of straw ash still glowing with embers, so the rice cooks evenly.

But no team builds just one mound of ash. They heap up several more that look exactly like the real one, with no pot beneath. If a pot is found too early, the rice may still be hard, the grains not cooked through to the core. If a pot is well hidden, the searchers must probe longer. Then the rice in it has a little more time to finish cooking.

Only after about one stick of incense has burned down do the village elders set out to search. The contest official carries a staff and probes each mound of ash. With him go one person carrying a tray to receive the four pots, and another holding an umbrella over the tray. One more carries a small hand drum. Each time the official stops before a team's mound, the drummer strikes a single beat, tùng.

The staff probes one mound and finds nothing. It probes another, still nothing. The whole team holds its breath. Only when the real pot comes to light does the courtyard burst into cheers. The team wipes the outside of the pot clean before offering it on the tray.

The elders scoop the rice from each pot into its own bowl and offer the bowls before the altar of the guardian spirit. Then the elders judge each team's rice right in front of the whole village.

Good rice must be white, tender and fragrant. Rice that is scorched at the bottom, mushy, or still hard will hardly win praise.

Toward noon, the elders perform the offering rites and award the prizes to the teams before the altar. Last of all, the whole village holds a ceremony of thanks to the guardian spirit. The teams share out the contest rice among the villagers. Everyone who gets a share hopes for a year of plenty and peace. Around the courtyard, people also play tug of war, ring toss, Chinese chess and pot smashing.

The festival ends. The bamboo camp stands empty again, just as in the morning. But today the camp has had its army. That army was the children racing for water, the young men making fire, and the people pounding rice and cooking it. As the village tells it, the general of long ago needed exactly such people, the ones who could keep an army fed. The four quarters have gone home. The camp is empty, yet not a single soldier is missing.