Enjoying a year-end dinner with a heap of family members to celebrate a new lunar year is the utmost desire of all Vietnamese, especially those who have to work far away from home.

In northern Vietnam, such a reunion party always has boiled chicken with salt and striped lemon leaves, frozen meat, pork paste, pig trotters stewed with bamboo shoots and certainly banh chung (square glutinous rice cake).

The square cakes have fat pork, green beans, onion, salt and pepper mixed with the rice. The cake is wrapped in green leaves and boiled. The white glutinous rice turns a green color. The square has many meanings in the code of conduct: straightforwardness, honesty and constancy. The cakes are good for both elderly people and children because of their ingredients, which make them soft and tasty. Ancient Vietnamese, when making banh chung, had a wish for justice and equality as eaters have to use a bamboo string to divide the dumplings into equal pieces. Dried shrimp served with picked scallion heads and braised pork is always seen at a Lunar New Year party in southern Vietnam. It is traditional in the region that locals prepare a tray of five fruits: custard apple, coconut, mango, papaya and fig, with a hope for a new prosperous year.

Like banh chung in the north, banh tet (cylindrical glutinous rice cake with green bean paste and fat pork) is indispensable during the Tet holidays in the southern region. People often use banana leaves to wrap the kind of dumplings.

Also there is a reddish-purple, magenta-colored, banh tet. In order to get this dumpling, people crush magenta-colored leaves and use the extract as a natural food coloring. Glutinous rice is put in the magenta extract overnight and this gives the rice its special color. As usual, fillings include green bean, fat pork, but also Chinese sausage. Slices of banh tet will look eye-catching thanks to the magenta colored rice, the limpid white of fat pork and red of Chinese sausage. Southerners use banana as a type of filling.

Compared with northerners and southerners, people in the central region have kept their Tet traditions intact. Central people always prepare nem, tre (a type of pork paste) and vegetable pickles. Their altars have incense, giving the whole house a pleasant smell.

Vietnamese have the habit of buying red-flesh water melon for Tet as the red color is the symbol of good luck. Also, it is widely believed that a happy new year will come if house are decorated with branches of hoa mai (apricot blossom) or hoa dao (peach blossom).

(Source: SGT)