Com (young green rice)

Sifting young sticky rice.

In the Oriental balance of yin and yang, green com represents yin or the female principal. 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, com continues to be a delicacy held dear by Vietnamese wherever they are, whether in Vietnam or abroad.

Hanoi is entering autumn. As you walk along a quiet street, you may notice on a gentle breeze the pleasant smell of new rice. 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 (or "com" in Vietnamese) 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 pounding com 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 Vietnam, included com as an entry in his Dictionarium annamiticum lusitanum et latinum (Vietnamese-Latin-Portuguese 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.

Com-making 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.

Com-making 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 a sweet as breast 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 fuelled by wood. They then pound the grains in a mortar while stirring them from bottom the top and add colouring extracted from crushed young rice plants to make the rice greener. The final product is com-flat, soft, fragrant and light green rice grains.

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 com. During the 19^th century, residents of Vong village in the Hanoi suburbs offered com to the Nguyen kings. The royal capital was in Hue then, and trains and motorised vehicles were not yet available; poor peasants from northern Vietnam 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 com in each basket. A small earth stove under the tray heated a vessel of water to create steam, which kept the com fresh.

Although a perfect dish, com has 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 - com nen, banh com, com xao, che com, cha 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 become banh com when the cook adds a filling of finely-pounded soybean, sugar and coconut and shapes a square cake, which is wrapped in banana leaves and tied with pink bamboo strings. Vietnamese use banh com as special gifts since the cakes can keep for a week. Children working away from home send banh com to their parents; the groom's family offers them to the bride's family; and relatives and close friends give banh com to each other during Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year.

Com xao is dried com fried with sugar and oil; however, this dish does not have the original flavour of com. A lighter dish is che com, which is an opaque watery pudding dotted with com grains and is often eaten as a dessert to lighten the heaviness of a big feast. Cha com is an ordinary meat pie eaten mixed with com grains to reduce the fatty taste. Kem com isice-cream made from com, a refreshment unique to Vietnam.

Com hoc of Binh Thuan province in southern Vietnam is popped sticky rice mixed with sugar and shaped into a square cake. Com dep, a speciality of the Khmer people in Soc Trnag province, is made by roasting ripe sticky-rice grains, removing the husks and then mixing the rice with coconut milk, coconut meat and groundnuts.

Like other people of my generation born before the First Indochina War (1945-1954), I have a special nostalgia for com. I grew up singing such folk ballads as:

Com from Vong, rice from Me Tri, Soya sauce from Ban and mints from Lang are the best.
and
I did not know that you had married
Now the com I kept as your wedding gift has turned mouldy...

I remember the days I spent as a jungle fighter, when I almost cried on an autumn afternoon because of my longing for the fragrance of com. Even now, I often think of the small packet of com my mother would buy for breakfast before I left for school.

Hanoi has two well-known specialties: pho (noodle soup) and com. If I had to compare the two, I would say pho is delicious but not noble. However, com is both delicious and noble. Hanoians may enjoy eating pho, but they never set it as an offering on the ancestral altar. However, some Hanoi families do offer their ancestors in the other world com 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, com continues to be a delicacy held dear by Vietnamese wherever they are, whether in Vietnam or abroad.

By NGUYEN HOA UYEN
(Vietnam Cultural Window)