TÔN GIÁO CỦA ẨM THỰC
Tôi không nói tới ảnh hưởng của ẩm thực trong việc đạo Hindu không ăn thịt bò, đạo Hồi không ăn thịt heo hay đạo Phật khuyến khích ăn chay; tôi muốn nhắc tới sự trung thành tuyệt đối của chúng ta dành cho ẩm thực quê hương, đất nước mình.
FROM THE LEGEND OF SERVING THE TROOPS
In Thi Cam village, the rice cooking contest pertains to a story about Phan Tay Nhac, a military commander of the 18th Hung King. Legend has it that when his troops were stationed in Thi Cam area, the villagers organized a rice cooking contest to serve the soldiers. Due to the short time and the large number of the troops, the villagers gathered together to pound the rice, get water from Nhue River and use bamboo to light a fire to cook rice. Therefore, the rice cooking contest in Thi Cam village nowadays is divided into three distinct stages: water fetching, fire making and rice cooking.
On the early morning of the contest day, four groups gather in front of the communal house. Each group has ten members, including both male and female, implicitly affirming the united spirit of the villagers in the legend.
When the drums sound, the four boys representing the competition groups rush to the banks of the
Nhue River to get the water and return to their team. At the same time, the others stay in the communal house and must use the friction between two pieces of dry bamboo to make fire. The final stage requires the most skills, including: turning the paddy into rice, whitening the rice and cooking the rice. Rice must be cooked with a straw fire, the burning straw enveloping the whole pot in order to ensure that the rice is well cooked. The groups usually build many straw fires, making it more difficult for the examiners to find the pots. The winning rice pot is presented to the altar of the village’s tutelary god, the legendary Phan Tay Nhac.
TO THE RITUAL OF “KEEPING FIRE” TODAY
One must participate in the contest in order to feel the bustling atmosphere. In the noisy drums and jubilant cheering sounds, there are poems and songs of praise for the rice and the fire keeping custom of the Vietnamese people. The contest
lasts only an hour, but the materials and equipment are prepared throughout the whole year: the villagers select the finest grain, select the oldest bamboo and dry the tinder for the fire-making stage.
Not only a festival or a ritual, the Thi Cam village’s rice cooking contest is also a performance of the villagers to show their respect to the rice and the history. When the villagers pass the tinder to each other to make a fire, as Nguyen Khoa Diem wrote, that is the moment “they pass their voices to their children to practice speaking”. When the young participants and observers smell the strong smoke and see the bustling atmosphere, they can imagine the stages of the traditional method of rice cooking in rural areas of Vietnam in ancient times; they can be reminded of their ancestors’ roots; they can feel the pulse of the traditional village’s hearts in the modern cultural flow.