What do you know about 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 offering time is usually at noon (Ngo hour - about 11am to 1pm) and Tet is celebrated at noon, so people also named Tet Doan Ngo Festival.

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, cooling. Fruits, ash cakes, as well as sticky rice wine are popular offerings during these days.

Sticky rice wine is sold a lot during the Dragon Boat Festival for people to offer. 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 spoonful in your mouth to enjoy.

Photo: Vu Minh Quan

Heritage Magazine