Vong Village Green Rice

In the old tale of Vòng village, the rain came one autumn long ago, while the sticky rice in the fields was not yet ripe.

The rice heads had just begun to bow. The grains were filling out, and their weight bent each head down like a fishhook. The rain came down in torrents, and a strong wind swept across the fields. Then the dike broke. Even the highest paddy in the fields sank out of sight. A whole sweet-smelling stretch of rice became, in moments, nothing but water.

The villagers grieved for their rice. They waded in and groped under the water, searching for every head of young rice they could still cut. Back home, they roasted the young rice dry in clay pots. At each meal they ate a little of it, to get through the hungry days.

They ate it only to keep hunger away. Yet the moment they chewed that roasted young rice, the villagers were amazed. It was sweet. It was fragrant. It had a flavor of its own that no one expected. The village says that this is how its cốm was born, in that year of floodwater.

In later years the harvests were good again. Still, every autumn, the villagers went on roasting young rice, no longer against hunger but for the pleasure of it. One neighbor told another, and each generation passed it on to the next.

Each time they made it, they learned something more and found a new way to do it. Each batch came out better than the one before. Over time, the grains of cốm grew more fragrant, softer, thinner and greener.

Little by little, cốm left the village. It traveled in parcels carried as gifts and in the baskets of street vendors. The elders liked to recite a folk verse that opens with the name cốm Vòng. It goes: Cốm from Vòng, fine rice from Mễ Trì. Soybean sauce from Bần, mint from Láng. Nothing could taste better. The villagers also say that cốm Vòng was once a precious gift offered to the Lý emperors.

No one knows for certain how long Vòng village has been making cốm. Even the villagers themselves are not sure. They say only that it has been a thousand years at the very least.

That flood lives only in the telling. The craft of cốm is real, and it is still alive today.

In the old days, the village was the hamlet of Hậu, part of the commune of Dịch Vọng in Hanoi. Vòng is also the word for a ring, and old people in the village say the name comes from a road that ran in a circle around the village. Beyond that ring road, the land belonged to another village.

Each year brings two seasons of cốm, following the year's two rice crops. The best loved is still the autumn cốm, from the very season of the old tale. The rice that cốm makers prize most has a name that sounds like a flower: nếp cái hoa vàng, yellow-flower sticky rice.

It is a long road from the rice head in the field to the grain of cốm in a lotus leaf. It begins when the rice first heads out, with the cốm makers already in the fields keeping watch. The grain is still green but already plump. Press it lightly, and a white sap oozes out, like milk. That is when the grain is holding its milk, the very moment to cut. Young rice at this stage is jade green, and cốm keeps that green.

In earlier days, during the cốm season, everyone in the household took one task, from early morning until night. One reaped, one stripped the grain from the stalks, one turned the grain. One roasted, one pounded, one wrapped.

While the sky was still dim and dew still clung to the rice heads, the reapers were already out in the fields. Usually, rice cut on a given day was roasted and pounded that same day.

In careful households, the harvested rice was never beaten or rubbed. The person stripping it held a single chopstick and drew it down each head from the tip, so the grains popped off one by one.

In the tale of the flood year, the villagers roasted their young rice in clay pots. Today, cốm makers roast the grain in a heavy cast-iron pan over a wood fire. They prefer wood because the cook can raise or lower a wood fire at will. Wood smoke also gives cốm a scent all its own.

At first the fire is high and steady. When the grains begin to turn pale, the roaster lowers the flame and stirs without stopping, so the grain heats evenly. Roasted too dry, the cốm will break. If the fire is too weak, the husks cling tight, and the whole batch has to be thrown away.

To tell whether the grain is ready, the cốm maker takes five grains, sets them on a flat surface, and presses down hard. If three shed their husks completely, and the other two keep their husks but have curled and bent, the grain is just right for pounding. The village sums up the test in a few words: two bent, three bare.

Once roasted, the grain is poured into a stone mortar sunk into the floor of the house. In earlier times, pounding cốm took two people. One worked the pestle with a foot, and the other sat by the mortar turning the cốm by hand. Now a pounding machine spares the feet.

When the husks come loose, the cốm maker winnows the grain to blow the chaff away, then pounds again, until the cốm is as thin as it should be. Some batches are done after three or four rounds. Others need six or seven, depending on the maker's skill and on how young the rice still is.

Each time the grain is winnowed, a few flakes of cốm fly up with the chaff. They are thin as paper and slender as a tiny tamarind leaf. This is tamarind-leaf cốm, praised as the finest of all. There is very little of it, and it is almost never sold. Village tradition says that long ago it was kept only as a gift for the emperor.

Cốm makers like to joke that a grain of golden rice costs nine drops of sweat, but a grain of cốm costs ninety. One cốm maker in Vòng village puts it this way: making cốm takes calm and patience, and no hurrying. A hot temper cannot make cốm. The pan may be hot, but the one at the stove must keep a cool head.

A parcel of cốm from Vòng village usually has two layers of leaves. The inner layer is a fresh ráy leaf, broad like a taro leaf, which keeps the cốm moist. The outer layer is a lotus leaf, which holds in the scent. Last, the parcel is tied with a shining golden stalk of sticky-rice straw.

Beside the parcel there are often a few very ripe bananas, their yellow skins freckled with tiny black spots. People call them chuối tiêu trứng cuốc. In autumn, ripe persimmons join them. Some people prefer cốm on its own, with nothing else, and call it cốm mộc. Cốm also goes into sticky rice, sweet soup, meat patties and cakes.

Eating cốm needs no bowl and no spoon. People simply open the lotus leaf, take a small pinch with three fingertips, and chew it very slowly.

In the old days, the cốm season filled the whole village with life. One old man of the village learned to make cốm at 16, taught by his own father. He recalls that in those seasons, the village lanes turned white with sticky-rice straw laid out to dry. Straw was draped right up onto the roofs. The rumble of threshing machines, the thud of pestles and the shake of sieves rang through the village. The smell of cốm and straw drifted as far as the next village.

Long ago, wide fields of sticky rice spread all around the village. The village elders recall rice planted all the way out to where the big road to Hòa Lạc runs today. All 80 hectares of Vòng village rice land have now become the houses and streets of the new Cầu Giấy quarter. The young rice for making cốm must now be bought from villages farther away.

Yet every autumn, a few kitchens in Vòng village still light a wood fire under a cast-iron pan, and parcels of cốm still travel with people into the city streets. Inside the lotus leaf, the grains are still jade green. It is the green of the young rice that, as the old tale tells it, the villagers once waded through floodwater to find.