What do you know about the Dragon Boat Festival?

The Duanwu Festival in Vietnam is called by a rather popular name, the “insect extermination” festival. The origin of the name comes from the story of farmers learning how to deal with insects that eat fruits and food after harvests.

To avoid food-destroying insects, people set up simple offerings including ash cakes (gio) and fruits at home. The offerings are usually made at noon (Ngo hour - around 11am to 1pm) and Tet is celebrated at noon, so people also named the Tet holiday Tet Doan Ngo.

Also because of the concept, the 5th lunar month is the most "unlucky" time of the year, because the summer is hot and humid, easily causing epidemics, so the dishes prepared for the Duanwu Festival need to absorb the properties of plants, the effect is to be easy to digest, cool down. Fruits, ash cakes, as well as sticky rice wine are popular offerings during these days.

Sticky rice wine is sold a lot during the Duanwu Festival for people to offer as offerings. Sticky rice is easy to cook, but to turn it into a delicious and “insect-killing” rice wine, a special yeast is needed. If you choose a bad yeast, one that is not of good quality, the rice wine will definitely be hard, not absorbed, and will not have the fragrant, sweet, spicy, and numbing taste on the tip of the tongue when you put each spoon into your mouth to enjoy.

Photo: Vu Minh Quan

Heritage Magazine