Traditional cake “cáy” in Nguyễn village

Nguyễn village is in Đông Hưng district, Thái Bình province, the homeland of this product. It’s locally told that it’s at first, just a kind of cake to be eaten during Tết holidays and its taste is good for winter time. Once in the year of rat or Canh Tý, a mandarin on his mission trip to the region, the villagers offered him with this kind of cake as their presents, back in the royal city.

He offered it to the king who tried and asked for the name, the mandarin answered it’s “bánh cáy” meaning “hot cake”. Since then it became well-known nationwide, other regions also produced the cake but nowhere it’s found as good as made in Nguyễn village.

           

That’s why, every year, on New-year occasion, Nguyễn villagers were privileged to make such cakes for the king and the royal families and the woman who first made the cake was awarded by the royal king and once in her dream, she saw two crabs in the sea, she tried to catch it but couldn’t because they disappeared. Before her death she told her children and grandchildren the story and asked them to the ocean. Her children did as they had been told and to their surprise, the sea welcome her since, the name of the cake “cay” was changed into “cáy or the crab-cake”.

           

It costs time and efforts to make such cakes, from choice of ingredients to the finished products. The villagers fry ground-nuts and sesame. They mix sugar with fat, pork is spiced to be fried yellow, sticky-rice is mixed in with mormordica, then cooked and pounded to make round cakes or bánh dầy, then cut into slices, put to be fried, finally mixed in with sugar, banana oil how to make it neither too dry nor too wet, then put everything into the frame to make the cake rectangle.

           

The cake is sweet but not so sweet as sugar, soft but not tough as mè xửng in Huế. It’s made up of countryside products, so it’s particularly tasty, it’s popularly known in Thái Bình province, it’s a product of wet-rice culture and it’s always present on altars during Tết  holidays or gifts to be sent away.

           

The cake becomes famous not only regionwide but nationwide and worldwide.      

                                       THANH HẰNG
source : http://www.vtr.org.vn/vtr.php?ml=923&pid=1132