Banh Com

While com, the pounded young green rice of the northern harvest, has been eaten for centuries, banh com itself dates only to the second half of the 19th century. By family tradition it was devised in 1865 by an ancestor of the Nguyen Duy household on Hang Than Street in Hanoi, who worked out how to dry the green rice flakes and cook them into a keeping cake, taking the sticky-rice tradition of banh chung as a starting point. The Hang Than workshops — the Nguyen Ninh name among the earliest — turned the street into Hanoi's banh com quarter, and the cake became indispensable to weddings, betrothals and death anniversaries, and a standard gift carried home by visitors.

Soft and yielding, with the faint pull of cooked sticky rice, the green paste tastes mildly sweet and milky, like very young grain. The mung bean centre is denser and rounder, lifted by a clean floral perfume of grapefruit blossom. It is not a sugary cake — the sweetness is restrained so the rice's own scent comes through. Eaten in small squares with tea, never in a hurry.

Everything turns on the com. The young rice is harvested while still milky, roasted and pounded flat, then either used fresh or dried for keeping; for banh com the flakes are softened and cooked patiently with sugar over low heat, stirred until they bind into a glossy, cohesive paste that will not slump. Too much heat dulls the green and turns it gummy. The mung-bean filling is steamed, mashed and sweetened, then perfumed with a drop of grapefruit-flower essence (hoa buoi), the classic Hanoi aromatic. Wrapping in banana leaf both shapes the squares and lends a faint leaf scent.