In the urbanization process, Nom village still retains many ancient traces, imbued with the unique features of the countryside of Vietnam: green stone bridge, Nom communal house - pagoda, Nom market...
In particular, Nom market is a tourist attraction because after more than 200 years, this place still has a traditional, rustic beauty with rows of markets built with red bricks, roofed with red tiles built right in front of the pagoda gate.
Nom Market mainly sells agricultural products and items necessary for the lives of people in the village. Walking around Nom market, among countless types of country cakes, if lucky, visitors can come across banh tay - a special gift of the village. Because in today's village, banh tay is made by few people and rarely appears on a regular basis.
According to Mr. Le Duc Viet (75 years old), the villagers shared that banh tay was previously only made for holidays, Tet or when the village had a big event. "The ingredients and way of making them sound quite similar to banh chung, but banh tay is different from banh chung", Mr. Viet emphasized.
The ingredients for making banh tay are very simple and available, including sticky rice, green beans, barley fat, sugar, dong leaves, and soft rice. Before making the cake, you have to soak the tofu for five hours, steep for three hours. Stir-fried green beans, boil, beat until smooth and stir-fry with sugar according to the ratio of 1kg of beans, 1kg of sugar.
When stir-frying beans under fire, quickly stir-fry them so that the beans do not burn or become acrid. After the bean sprouts, the farmer carefully chooses the fat to form a bar about 30cm long, wrapped inside with a layer of grated green, yellow bean sprouts, no more pigs or nuts.
Each banh tay needs to use about three dong leaves and a bamboo frame divided in half. The leaves are wrapped about 30cm long, the leaf belly is pressed out, the inner leaves are placed opposite so that the two leaf backs touch each other.
"After placing the leaves, I will pour them into a cup of rice, arranging them evenly, adding them to the fatty green bean filling, then spread them over a thin layer of rice," said Mr. Viet.
According to Mr. Viet, the difficulty of wrapping cakes is to make them beautiful, requiring the purity of the maker. When arranging the rice, it must be thin but the sticky rice must be kept tightly around the filling. In particular, in the cake wrapping stage, when grasping the two edges of the leaves to pull up high, the hands simultaneously lifted slightly and rolled them quickly. Taking the leaves and grabling the rice unskillfully is the rice and filling separated into cakes.
The time to wrap each banh tay is about 5 - 6 minutes. The cake is wrapped and boiled for about five hours. During the boiling time, the maker must watch like a banh chung soup, avoid letting the cake pot lack water and the heat is not constant. The cooked cake is taken out and left for about two hours to stir-fry, then used your hand to roll it a few times to make the cake more round.
Banh tay is easy to eat and cut as it is. When eating, the cake is cut into small pieces with a soft cross. Each cute, round cake is made of a layer of light green sticky rice with leaves, surrounded by yellow fillings like small flowers.
Squeezing a plate of cake in his hand, diners occasionally listen to the fragrant, fragrant, ripe sticky rice sticky rice. Taste a piece of cake and immediately feel the sweetness and richness of sugar, fat, and beans. Sweet but not sweet, fatty but not fat, the cake pieces are small and pretty so you eat well without getting bored. Banh tay can be stored in the refrigerator, when eaten, it must be steamed instead of boiled.
Sharing about the story of banh tay, Mr. Viet said thatom Pagoda worships Saint Tam Giang - a famous general who recruited soldiers from all over to set up a camp in the pine forest, on the village's land, then established a hamlet and developed the village from there.
According to legend, to help soldiers have the health to fight for a long time, the people of Nom village made banh tay - a long cake made with just a hand-carved cake for soldiers and soldiers to easily carry during marches.
Banh tay thu ngan, cut and eat very easily, and have full sticky rice, sugar, fat, and beans as a meal to help soldiers increase their fighting spirit. In the past, there were three things in the worship tray of the house of the Nom village: pigs, banh tay, and flowers. Now, only banh tay still exists, Mr. Viet shared.
However, nowadays, there are not many people in the village who make banh tay anymore because the ingredients are easy to find, but the preparation and wrapping of banh tay is elaborate, as well as the story of banh tay is only in the memories of the elderly in the village.
"When there are holidays and Tet, when customers order, my family still wrap the cakes. When my children and grandchildren ask me about banh tay, I tell them, and if I tell anyone about the village's typical banh tay, it's probably the best thing," said Mr. Viet.
