Feasts for the New Year

Feasts for the New Year

Many overseas Vietnamese, nostalgic for days gone by, return to Vietnam to spend Tet with family and to pay respect to elders and ancestors. People are busy in the days before the first day of the Lunar New Year, known as Tet Nguyen Dan. They clean their homes and then decorate them, particularly with flowering branches of yellow hoa mai (ochna) or pink hoa dao (similar to apricot, peach and quince blossoms).

Everyone shops for specialty items wrapped in auspicious red and gold packaging. Superstitions abound as people try to ensure good luck, prosperity and happiness for the future. Among them is the belief that the first person to offer Tet greetings at your home will share his or her good fortune with you in the coming year.

At the centre of the hubbub is the food, most of which is prepared in advance to allow people plenty of time for fun once the holiday begins. While regional differences exist, typical dishes include such rich meats as long-simmered kho made with pork or beef and various gio and cha sausages; pickled and preserved vegetables to cut their richness; and candies and sweetmeats to refresh the palate.

But regardless of the region, banh chung are always on the menu. The square sticky rice cakes are wrapped in green leaves (dong leaves in Vietnam; banana leaves abroad), then boiled for up to twelve hours, depending on their size. Small ones measure four to five inches (10-12cm) wide and larger ones are the size of adobe bricks. The outer layer of rice becomes perfumed and tinted by the green leaf. Inside, the grains remain white and encase a buttery bean filling streaked with pepper and studded with chunks of lean pork and bits of its opaline fat.

Banh chung may be eaten warm or at room temperature; they may also be panfried up as crispy pancakes. (When the same ingredients are wrapped as cylindrical cakes, they are called banh tet.) Because they are inexpensive to prepare and they keep for a long time, Vietnamese families traditionally cooked up dozens of them.

My parents, who are now in their eighties, revel in describing the sequence of events that went into making the cakes when they lived in Vietnam. Two days before Tet, the ingredients were gathered and readied. The next day, everybody from young to old got involved in wrapping and boiling the cakes, which lasted from early morning to late at night. The boiling was done outdoors in huge pots set over a wood, coal or rice-straw fire.

Since the moon barely shone on New Year’s Eve, the pitch black night was lit by people’s banh chung fires. Everyone eagerly anticipated their first tastes of the cakes, especially the children, some of whom slept by the fire. By the time the cakes were done, it was already the first day of the New Year, and the leaf-wrapped banh chung were quickly carried into the house, where they were prominently displayed to signal the start of the feast.

My Tet celebrations today in California are not that elaborate. However, I do make banh chung from a recipe that my mother taught me, and which I wrote up in my first cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. She brought the recipe from Vietnam when we left in 1975. I use a wooden mold that an American friend made for me.

Many Vietnamese people nowadays buy banh chung because they lack time and perhaps know how. I understand, but after all these years I can tell you this: Banh chung is a magical thing.

You can count the number of ingredients on one hand. With those ingredients and some leaves, you can create a three-dimensional edible object that looks like a gift box. And that culinary origami is sturdy enough to endure hours of boiling. Finally, when you unwrap your bundle of joy, it is incredibly fragrant and beautiful.

The simple deliciousness and genius of banh chung embodies the grace and spirit of the Vietnamese people. It is a food marvel, conjured from humble ingredients. It is incredibly Viet. Most importantly, it makes me very proud.

By Andrea Nguyen - Andrea Nguyen, Vietnamese-American cook and author in California