Vietnamese Rice Floating Cake: The Cake Of Literature

Talking about food, its main task does not only stop at pleasing our sense of tasting. Painting and literature, for example, are the two fields where food-related topics make up a significant portion. We’ve heard about famous food paintings in history. For instance, Vincent van Gogh was a famous European artist whose style was an impressionist. The majority of his well-known work consisted of still-life paintings (paintings of inanimate objects) in which food was the central focus. Now we’ve known that food makes its appearance in painting. For today, we will get to know about a crossover case of Vietnamese food and literature, a poem named “Banh Troi Nuoc” written by Ho Xuan Huong-a Vietnamese female poet born at the end of the Lê dynasty (1772). This unique poem uses the metaphor of the floating rice cake to depict the beauty and the tragic life of women in the feudalism era.

But before we actually analyze the poet, let’s get to know our main focus of the poem, the floating rice cake (or banh troi nuoc in Vietnamese).

Banh troi nuoc takes the shape of a floating rice ball in a bowl of sweet broth. About the word’s etymology, banh refers to any cake, troi means floating, and nuoc refers to water/liquid. In this case, nuoc is sugarcane syrup mixed with coconut milk as the sweet broth for the dish. Most of the time, banh troi nuoc is best known as a dessert, but in many Vietnamese regions, it can also be a savory dish. In this savory version, the sweet broth portion is eliminated.

There are three main parts of a typical banh troi nuoc: the skin, the filling, and the broth. The skin is made of glutinous rice starch. A chef will first make the cake mix by adding warm water, rice starch, salt, and yeast. Next, he/she will wait for it to puff up and use hands to make it into a roll. The roll is then cut into small pieces and left aside for later.

Now it’s time for the filling! Usually, mung bean is the main filling ingredient, but one can add any type of filling they like. Some to be named include taro, red bean, durian, or palmyra palm caramel. First, the beans are soaked to remove dust particles and then transferred to a steam pot. After that, the steamed beans are smashed, seasoned, and rolled into balls.

With the fillings and dough ready, it’s now the assembling portion. The chef will take a piece of rice dough, flatten it, and the filling ball is placed in the center. Everything is now wrapped in a nice smooth ball. And all the finished balls are brought to a boil.

Finally, the sweet broth is prepared by boiling a mixture of sugarcane syrup and gingers. A lot of time, a layer of coconut milk can be added on the top for a milky flavor and garnishing.

Now we have learned all the essential things about floating rice cake, so what is the deal between a floating rice cake and the fate of women in the feudalism era? Well, you’re about to find out now.

Poem Analysis: bánh trôi nước by Hồ Xuân Hương

Hồ Xuân Hương (胡春香; 1772-1822) was a Vietnamese poet born at the end of the Lê dynasty. She grew up in an era of political and social turmoil - the time of the Tây Sơn rebellion and a three-decade civil war that led to the beginning of the Nguyễn dynasty. She wrote poetry using chữ nôm (Southern Script), which adapts Chinese characters for writing demotic Vietnamese. She is considered to be one of Vietnam’s greatest classical poets.

Bánh trôi nước

Thân em vừa trắng lại vừa tròn (My body is white; my fate, softly rounded)

Bảy nổi ba chìm với nước non (Rising and sinking like mountains in streams)

Rắn nát mặc dù tay kẻ nặn (In whatever ways hands may shape me)

Mà em vẫn giữ tấm long son (At the center my heart is red and true)

In the first read, it’s almost straightforward for anyone to realize the presence of the floating rice cake in this poem. Immediately, you can imagine a nice smooth rice ball floating in a bowl of warm syrup broth. But with a bit of analysis, the poem depicts the unstable life of women under feudalism government.

“My body is white; my fate, softly rounded” is talking about the women’s beauty, obviously.

“Rising and sinking like mountains in streams” is referring to the instability of a woman’s life at that time. It’s full of ups and downs just like a rice ball floating and sinking the bowl of syrup.

“In whatever ways hands may shape me” refers to how a woman’s life is mainly driven by those around her and not by her own decisions. In the feudalism era, Vietnamese society is primarily ruled by male power. Women and children at that time were considered insignificant. The women’s fates entirely depended on the male members of their households. It could be good or bad, depending on a planned path by their fathers or husbands. If you were lucky enough to be born in this era, you would see how harsh it was to be a woman. Ever since a female was born, she was destined to marry someone and got pregnant with him. And even when she finally got married, the female was grounded most of the time at home for chores and gardening and only allowed to go out for groceries. Even the empress could not escape her fate. When a king suddenly died for some reason, the empress must be buried with him for his journey to the other world. These details about women’s life are closely connected to the action of making a floating rice ball. If the chef has good skills, the ball will look beautiful, just like a woman when she’s in the hands of a good husband. However, if the chef doesn’t have good skills, the result will be faulty rice balls as compared to a woman’s fate when she is placed in an unwanted relationship with some men. And desperately, she doesn’t have the right to reverse it.

“At the center my heart is red and true” is referring to the good virtues of a woman: love and loyalty. At anytime and in any situation, a woman always displays those characteristics to people around her. No matter how rough the situation that she is bearing, one cannot change the good characteristics of a woman. Just like a rice ball, even though the shape of the skin may not look as pretty, you cannot fully judge it until you taste the fillings because that’s the best part.

This famous poem in Vietnamese literature even has its own song. You can check it out in the link below. In the MV, the singer depicts unique beauty of women from different social classes: the hard-working peasant, the charming poet, the powerful empress, etc. They may come from different levels, but after all, they’re beautiful and deserve the right to write their own life stories.

As you can see in this example above, food is not just about eating. For what we’ve known, food has unlimited opportunities that come with it. Each different combination will yield a unique result. When one type of food is combined with another type, it creates a dish that will satisfy our sense of tasting. But when food is combined with art or literature, it opens a new horizon in which we will learn something that can lighten our mind. People usually call it as “food for your inner self.”