Bamboo rice and the offering ceremony

The rice farmers most look forward to the day when the rice is curving and milky. It is already autumn, the weather is cool, and it is also the beginning of the bamboo rice season. The households in the village whose rice fields are next to each other gather together. They choose the most beautiful day of the month to hold the ceremony.

Bamboo rice of the Tay people.

People put rice into young bamboo tubes with a sufficient amount of water and then grill it on a charcoal stove until the rice is cooked. This is how the bamboo tube rice is made. With this method, the bamboo tube rice when peeled off is green, fragrant and very sticky. Bamboo tube rice is eaten with grilled chicken, just enjoying it once will make people remember it for a long time. On the day of worshiping the dead, the dead are invited to drink wine, eat bamboo tube rice and chicken. People sing folk songs to pray for a good harvest and rice to fill the forests and fields.

Nowadays, bamboo rice has appeared in mountain tourist areas and restaurants selling ethnic minority dishes in the city. People call bamboo rice a noble specialty and have spent a lot of time discussing this strange dish. I asked the village elder about these stories and he laughed: "There is no story about bamboo rice, my child. It's just that in the past, people were so poor that they didn't have a pot to cook rice, so they used bamboo as a pot. People saw that the rice grilled in bamboo tubes was delicious, so they told each other to make it together. That's the origin of bamboo rice..."

Nowadays, people just soak rice in bamboo tubes and then grill them, or even boil them like banh chung, so bamboo rice is not much different from sticky rice. I can no longer find the unique taste of new sticky rice mixed with the scent of young bamboo in the bamboo rice pieces of my old days.

You Wei