(VOVWORLD) - The Cham community celebrates many festivals and ceremonies each year. For each event, they prepare offerings that represent their wish for peace, favorable weather, an abundant harvest, and sufficiency. During the Kate festival, a National Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Cham people express through culinary offerings their reverence for their deities and ancestors.
 An ancestral worship at home during the Cham’s Kate Festival (Photo: Doan Si/VOV-Ho Chi Minh City) |
In celebration of the Kate Festival, Cham chefs showcase their skills with typical dishes – steamed sticky rice, eggplant soup with freshwater fish, boiled chicken, and various types of traditional cakes, such as ginger cake, cylindrical sticky rice cake, glutinous rice cake, and sakaya cake.
“Ginger cake is indispensable. It’s primarily made from eggs, glutinous rice flour, and sugar. Ginger and vanilla add the typical flavor. Whatever else we prepare, we must have ginger cake to offer our ancestors,” Nguyen Thi San of Lam Dong province explained.
Dishes prepared for the Kate Festival reflect the belief that every aspect of the community’s livelihood is influenced by the ancestors. In offering food, the Cham people ask the blessings of their ancestors and the deities of heaven and earth. The practice also reflects the Vietnamese tradition of remembering one’s roots.
 Traditional cakes of the Khmer (Photo: Doan Si/ VOV-Ho Chi Minh City) |
Boiled goat meat and goat meat soup with mixed herbs are prepared exclusively as offerings to the deities at temples and towers. Those dishes are not permitted as offerings of home worship.
“We arrange ten trays of cakes and ten trays of savory dishes, including soup, grilled fish, braised fish, chicken soup, and rice. Today, as our economic condition improves, families might prepare more dishes, but they must have at least those basic offerings. Some families might have curry or stewed duck, depending on their budget,” said Van Thi Kim Thanh of Lam Dong province.
Lam Tan Binh of Lam Dong province said that in addition to honoring their origins and the merits of their ancestors, Kate offerings also convey a deeper meaning: the faithfulness of the mother, the filial piety of the children, and the father’s merits in raising and nurturing them.
 Khmer women make ginger cakes. (Photo: Doan Si/ VOV-Ho Chi Minh City) |
“Cham offerings are beautifully arranged in layers to honor the matrilineal system. The round cake, representing yin, is placed in a higher position. Elongated items, representing yang, is placed lower. This arrangement honors the women’s faithfulness above the men’s devotion to his family,” Binh said.
Kate is the largest annual festival of Cham Brahmanism in Lam Dong and Khanh Hoa province. It’s held at the beginning of the seventh month of the Cham calendar to commemorate the merits of the ancestors. The festival is held sequentially, beginning at the temple, then at the village, and finally in the home.