People all across Viet Nam celebrate TET (the Lunar New Year festival), but each region has its own TET traditions. For people from Hue, the traditional TET meal must have at least these three dishes: bánh tét ăn với dưa món (sticky-rice cakes served with pickled vegetables), thịt dầm (preserved meat), and tré (spicy pork rolls). A serving tray brimming with delicacies doesn't seem like Tet unless it contains these three dishes. Each can be prepared well in advance, allowing the cooks to rest at TET and enjoy the feast.
Hue residents shape their traditional TET sticky-rice cakes into a roll. To prepare this dish, they soak glutinous rice in a mixture of pure water and ground herbs, which turn the rice a fragrant deep green. Then they season ground mung beans and mix them with pork fat. They layer the sticky rice and the bean mixture on banana leaves, which they roll. The finished cake is similar to the bánh chưng xanh (square sticky-rice cakes) eaten at Tet in northern Viet Nam.
Local people in Hue balance the heavy, fatty taste of sticky-rice cakes with the sharper flavour of pickled vegetables made from beets, squash, carrots, green papayas, pineapples, and peppers. Chefs sculpt the vegetables to look like cut flowers, then soak them for one week in high-quality fish sauce and sugar mixed in a glazed pot. The pickle juice turns a deep amber, while the vegetables become crunchy, white, fragrant, and sweet.
Hue culinary artists prepare their traditional Tet thịt dầm (preserved meat) from corned beef or pork rump mixed with ground cow snout, pig ears, and cartilage. They cut the meat into large slivers, which they boil until thoroughly cooked. They then cool the meat, dry it with a clean towel, press the slices under a bamboo strainer and cover them with a mixture of fish sauce, sugar, and vinegar. They let the brew steep for five days to preserve the meat. The resultant thin slices are like big leaves. Hue residents eat thịt dầm with pickled vegetables, green onions, and mustard greens. Even more special condiments are green bananas and figs that have been soaked in milky white vinegar.
Cooks prepare tre (spicy pork rolls) by boiling meat from the head of a pig. Then they fry the pork until the meat is firm and the skin cracks. They slice the meat into thin threads and spice it with galangal, garlic, fried sesame, rice powder, salt, and pepper. The chefs then knead the spiced mixture into cylindrical shapes, which they cover with a guava or clove leaf to add fragrance and to accelerate fermentation. Finally, they wrap the tre in banana or palm leaves and hang them over a warm stove for several days to marinate. Cooks must do this process exactly right to achieve the desired taste.