When autumn comes, you may notice on a gentle breeze the pleasant scent of new rice as you walk along a quiet street of Ha Noi. Look across the street, and you'll see a woman vendor shouldering a pole with two baskets covered with large lotus leaves. The young green rice (com) she is selling refreshes the air with countryside fragrance. What bliss after a hot, humid and dusty summer!
For centuries, Com has been part of autumn in the Red River Delta, with the sound of pestles heard pounding young green rice day and night. Mothers present coin in large lotus leaves to their children, who watch to make sure their shares are equal.
Alexandre de Rhodes, the first French Jesuit missionary to visit Viet Nam, included con] as an entry in his Dictionarium Annannticum LusitanumLatinum (Vietnamese Portuguese-Latin Dictionary) published in Rome in 1651, though he defined Com only as "pounded green rice." However, the process requires a skill (and sometimes even an art) that has been perfected over generations.
Making Com is a family secret, which parents teach only their sons and daughters-in-law but never their daughters. They fear that married daughters will reveal the secret to their husbands' families and create competition.
Making Com demands a high level of skill. First, the artisan must select the perfect rice. A special kind of sticky rice, nep hoa vang, is best because its grains are smaller and rounder than other varieties. The artisan plucks grains in the paddy and gently bites them to check for ripeness. If the taste is as sweet as milk, the rice is ready for making Com.
Harvesters hand pluck the grains (ordinary threshing would impair quality) and winnow them with a flat bamboo basket. They roast the rice, stirring the grains in a hot pan over a gentle fire fueled by wood. They then pound the grains in a mortar while stirring them from bottom to top and add colouring extracted from crushed young rice plants to make the rice greener. The final product is com flat, soft, and fragrant rice grains that are a delicate green.
Com is eaten fresh, a pinch at a time, so the gentle sweetness can penetrate. Persimmons and bananas add subtlety to the taste.
Even the kings and queens of the past enjoyed con. 'During the nineteenth century, residents of Tong Village in the Ha Noi suburbs offered coin to the Nguyen kings. The royal capital was in Hue then, and trains and motorised vehicles were not yet available; poor peasants from northern Viet Nam walked ten days to deliver the delicacy. They devised a special method to keep Com fresh and tasty. Using a shoulder pole, each porter carried a pair of bamboo baskets with a tin tray of thinly spread comin each basket. A small earthen stove under the tray heated a vessel of water to create steam, which kept the Con fresh.
Although a perfect dish, Comhas a disadvantage: It must be eaten within twenty-four hours or its subtle taste will be lost. What if you want to enjoy it later? Don't worry! Vietnamese make other Com dishes coin nen, banh Com, Com xao, che com, kem Com, Com hoc, and Com dep for just that purpose.
Com nen is Com stir-fried in sugary water and wrapped with banana leaves. It becomes banh com when the cook adds a filling of finely-pounded mung bean, sugar, and coconut and shapes a square cake, which is wrapped in banana leaves and tied with pink bamboo strings. Vietnamese use banh coim as special gifts since the cakes can keep for a week. Children working away from home send bcinh com to their parents; the groom's family offers them to the bride's family; relatives and close friends give banh com to each other during Tat, the Lunar New Year.
Com xao is dried cdm fried with sugar and oil; however, this dish does not have the original flavour of cdm. A lighter dish is the com, which is an opaque, watery plodding dotted with co'm grains. It is often eaten as a dessert to lighten the heaviness of a large meal. che com is an ordinary meat pie mixed with corn grains to reduce the fatty taste. Kern com is ice-cream made from com, a refreshment unique to Viet Nam.
Cơm học of Binh Thuận Province in southern Việt Nam is popped sticky rice mixed with sugar and shaped into a square cake. Co'm dep, a specialty of the Khmer people in Soc Trang Province, is made by roasting ripe sticky-rice grains, removing the husks, and then mixing the rice with coconut milk, coconut meat, and groundnuts.
Vietnamese born before the First Indochina War (1945-1954) have a special nostalgia for Com. They grew up singing such folk ballads as:
Com from Vong, rice from Me Tri,
Soya sauce from Ban, mints from Lang can anything be tastier?
or
I did not know that you had married
And that my Com had grown moldy.
HA Noi has two well-known specialties: phd (noodle soup) and cdm. If the two are compared, some will say that phd is delicious but not noble. However, com is both delicious and noble. Hanoians may enjoy eating phd, but they never set it as an offering on their ancestral altars. However, some HA Noi families do offer their ancestors in the other world cdm at the beginning of autumn before they themselves enjoy this treat.
In the Oriental balance of yin and yang, green Com represents yin or the female principle. Eaten with red persimmon, which denotes yang or the male principle, Com gives one the feeling of perfect harmony with the universe. Perhaps for this reason, cdm continues to be a delicacy held dear by Vietnamese wherever they are, whether in Viet Nam or abroad.