At dawn, along the road of My Long village are rows of deliciously fragrant cakes. In the bakery, women are constantly rinsing and removing thin layers of cake from the surface of a pot of boiling water.
In the last days of the year, along the streets of My Long village (My Thanh, Giong Trom, Ben Tre) are endless rows of rice paper. The whole village is fragrant because of the rich aroma of coconut milk.
The last 3 months of the year is a “making big deal” for more than 200 rice paper bakeries in the village. The production scene is bustling from morning to night.
“My family makes a little, 60 liters of flour a day. Basically, we only do it for 3 months right before Tet , so we can make a profit of about a hundred million dong,” Ms. Thu (50 years old) shared.
The house is at the beginning of the village, right on the main road, so Mrs. Thu has both a rice cooker and a cake stand. Mrs. Thu’s bakery covers all kinds of cakes of types I, II, III at a price of 3-7 thousand VND/piece.
Mrs. Thu learned the trade from her mother, and now her daughter continues to work as a cake maker. Baking tools are still the same oven, water pot, and drying rack from ancient times, and the technique has not changed at all.
Continuously rotating her hands and eyes between two pots of boiling water, as soon as she removed the cake from the cloth stretched over the pot’s surface, Ms. Thu quickly coated it with a new layer of dough. The series of operations must be completed in 30 seconds before the cake is overcooked, leaving the woman with almost no time to rest.
Once the rice paper is finished, put it on a bed to dry in the sun, but don’t let it get too dry. After sunset, the cake layers are exposed to dew again to ensure moisture and avoid brittle cakes that break easily during storage.
Next to Mrs. Thu’s house, Mrs. Thuy’s bakery (49 years old) is also busy working. To coat 100 liters of dough every day, Ms. Thuy has to start work at 1 a.m. to finish it before noon.
Steam rising from the pot of water to coat the cake made Ms. Thuy’s face turn red. Women work with the highest level of concentration because the coating step largely determines the quality of the cake, which is also the most difficult step to do.
“Making a cake doesn’t look simple at all. If you make a mistake, the cake will be torn and ruined. I learned the trade from my grandmother and mother, and have been working for nearly 40 years now.
I make cakes that cost 3,000 VND/piece, making 2,200 cakes a day. Every day, except for the labor rental fee of 1 million VND, I still put away nearly 1 million VND in profit. In previous years, it was very quiet, but this year the weather is not favorable, the number of purchases has also decreased a lot,” Ms. Thuy shared.
Although Ms. Trang is only 33 years old, she is already a skilled cake maker. However, because her family’s conditions were not convenient to open the oven, Ms. Trang chose to work for her neighbors.
The bakery where Ms. Trang works has the owner as the main worker and 3 workers as assistant workers. The main worker only needs to coat the cake, while the assistant workers do the remaining steps including drying, removing, cutting, and folding the cake.
“Every day I have a lot of goods, I will sit with the owner to help with the preparation. The helper who works from morning to noon has a salary of 300,000 VND/day. If I work until the afternoon, I get an additional 150,000 VND. In the countryside, that’s a good life,” said Ms. Trang. laughing.
Of the more than 200 bakeries in the village, a few dozen bake all year round, while most only make cakes in the last months of the year to sell during the Tet season. Not only is it a specialty, rice paper is also an indispensable offering for people in the region, so during the Tet season it is easier to sell and at a better price.
Bakers are mainly grandmothers and mothers. It’s still just ingredients like rice flour, coconut milk, eggs, milk, sugar, salt, sesame, but each family has its own secret to making cakes, preserved for many generations.
According to the bakers, My Long craft village has existed since the time when Lord Nguyen brought people here. At that time, My Long was assigned to make rice paper for mandarins. Rice paper served as a food reserve for the army.
In 2008, My Long received the title of Vietnam’s Typical Craft Village. In 2018, the baking profession here was recognized by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism as a national intangible cultural heritage
($1~24,000 VND)
Photo,Video: Internet (Vinlove.net)