Bánh cuốn Period COrigin theory CVerified

Bánh cuốn is a rolled rice sheet from northern Vietnam. A fermented rice batter is poured in a thin layer onto a cloth stretched over the mouth of a steaming pot, covered, and steamed for a moment. The sheet comes out thin enough to see through; it is lifted off the cloth, filled with minced pork and wood-ear mushroom, and rolled up. Rice, pork, and wood ear have long been everyday foods in this region. Today banh cuon is sold on the street as a light breakfast.

The written trail of these thin sheets reaches back to 1943, to Hà Nội băm sáu phố phường ("Hanoi's Thirty-Six Streets"), a collection of essays by the writer Thạch Lam. He describes the banh cuon of Thanh Trì, a village near Hanoi, as "thin as a sheet of paper and translucent as silk," and notes that Hanoi has another kind as well, in which thin sheets wrap a filling of pork, shiitake, and wood ear. By 1943 at the latest, then, filled rolls of paper-thin sheets were being sold in Hanoi.

The essays do not say what the sheets were made from, or how they were steamed. When today's method of steaming a thin rice batter on cloth began, and when the dish took its present form, is not known.

The village most famous for banh cuon is Thanh Trì, just outside Hanoi. The banh cuon that the writer Thạch Lam praised in 1943 as thin as paper and translucent as silk was Thanh Trì's. The village carries a tradition that the dish was born there: An Quốc, a prince of the eighteenth Hùng king, is said to have taught the villagers how to make it.

Nothing beyond the tradition itself supports it. The Hùng kings belong to a legendary age that left no contemporary writing, and no record shows a prince handing down the recipe. Even Thạch Lam, praising the village's sheets, does not call Thanh Trì the birthplace of the dish. That Thanh Trì is a renowned producer is clear; that the dish began there is a legend with no grounds.

Records of rolled cakes, though, are far older. They appear in writings from the Trần dynasty, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In 1291 the emperor Trần Nhân Tông sent spring cakes to Zhang Xianqing, an envoy of the Yuan court, with a poem in classical Chinese whose lines run "紅玉堆盤春菜餅、從來風俗舊安南": the spring-vegetable cakes heaped on the platter are an old custom of An Nam. Around 1335, Lê Tắc's An Nam chí lược records that at the Cold Food festival people gave one another rolled cakes (寒食以捲餅相饋). Eating rolled cakes at festivals and giving them as gifts was already a custom in Vietnam by then. A later Hán-Nôm dictionary, the Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa, is said to call this rolled cake by the name bánh cuốn. On this basis, one view holds that the rolled festival cakes of the Trần period were the forerunner of today's banh cuon.

Neither text, however, says what the cakes were made of or how. A modern annotation to the poem explains them as thinly rolled-out dough wrapped around plenty of vegetables and a little cold meat. If so, they may have been made quite differently from today's sheets, which are poured and steamed on cloth. There is also a view that the technique of the Chinese spring cake came over and took root locally, but no source has yet been found showing where it came from.

Another view traces banh cuon to cheung fun, the rice-sheet rolls of southern China (Guangdong), which are also made by steaming a thin rice batter and rolling it. A 2017 English-language article on food culture wrote that "Bánh cuốn's ancestor takes the form of chee cheong fun rolls, hailing from South Chinese cooking." But it gives no date, no route, and no source for the claim. No record has yet been found, on either the Vietnamese or the Chinese side, that says whether the dish passed from cheung fun to banh cuon or the other way, whether both branched from a common ancestor, or whether they arose separately.

The custom of giving rolled cakes at festivals goes back to the Trần dynasty, and paper-thin banh cuon was being sold on the streets of Hanoi by 1943. Whether the Trần cakes lead to today's sheets, and when today's way of making them began, is still unknown.