Exhausted after 12 hours of cooking, Nguyen Thi Thuy Hong gently unpeels the last of five leaves encasing a squishy, sticky rice cake known as banh chung — a Lunar New Year delicacy in Vietnam.
The wrapped cakes of glutinous rice, green beans and pork belly have for centuries been one of several dishes prepared in a frenzy at home especially for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, which begins on Wednesday. Hong, 55, has labored over the dish — which must be boiled for 12 hours over a wood fire — almost every year for the last four decades.
“We can buy ready-made banh chung, but it doesn’t create that Tet atmosphere,” she said, explaining she enjoyed the process of cleaning leaves, soaking rice and pre-cooking beans in the very early morning.
Photo: AFP
“It keeps me busy, and it’s tiring, but I still love making the cake myself,” she said.
According to an oft-told legend, the banh chung recipe was first prepared thousands of years ago by a Vietnamese prince who wanted to impress his father in a bid for the throne. Pleased with the cake’s flavor and impressed with his son’s demonstration of respect, the king duly handed down his crown.
The banh chung are often laid at family altars as an offering to ancestors, who are widely venerated in Vietnam — a communist country that is officially atheist, but still steeped in Confucian social mores.
Many families no longer make them from scratch, but for those that keep the tradition, the work usually falls to the elders of the family.
Hong’s 23-year-old son Nguyen Dao Anh Khoi is already fretting over taking the helm. “Our generation has so many other things to worry about, so I am not sure I can keep this up,” he said as he rinsed a mound of rice under an outside tap at their Hanoi home.
For now, he is happy to enjoy the rich and comforting cooking of his mother. A self-described healthy eater who often prefers Western dishes, Khoi makes an exception for banh chung. “It’s a bit fatty and too starchy,” but “it’s also delicious,” he said.
“I can’t imagine a Tet without banh chung,” he added.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS