3 minute read
Bánh Appétit!
Bánh Appétit!
By Sarah Baird
There is a specific joy that’s found in snacking on a bánh mì sandwich, whether you’re grabbing one from a strip mall in New Orleans East or picking up breakfast from a food cart on a winding, cobblestone street in Ho Chi Minh City. Unlike so many makers of between-the-bread creations that rely too heavily on a sweeping smear of condiments or stacks on stacks of meat to make them delectable, the Vietnamese know that sandwiches — just like any fine-dining dish or high-end cocktail — need balance. This often means a rainbow’s worth of colorful vegetables — including pickled carrots, stark-white julienned daikon and red-hot chile slivers — adorned with a drag through the garden of fresh herbs like cilantro, and nestled in a bed of buttery mayonnaise and pork sausage, meatballs, ham or chicken that’s been stuffed into a delicate, flaky baguette.
But the bánh mì isn’t just a decadent, thoughtful sandwich: It’s a holistic picture of Vietnamese history in a single bite. The ingredients that make up the “bánh” (bread) and “mì” (wheat) reflect Vietnam’s colonial history, specifically the intersection of French colonialism and local Vietnamese ingenuity. While the French introduced two staple building blocks of the bánh mì to Vietnam, the baguette and liver pâté, the Vietnamese masterminded their own version of the baguette using rice flour, due to wheat’s exorbitant cost as well as French gatekeeping of the delicious (but expensive) bread. The reimagined baguette proved to be an ideal vehicle for an on-the-go bite for workers, and shop owners responded in kind by adding a balanced meal’s worth of nutritious, sustaining filling to the portable snack.
“My father’s eighty-something-year-old friends recall that around the early 1940s, Saigon vendors started offering bánh mì thi nguoi, an East-meets-West combination of cold cuts stuffed inside baguette with canned French butter or fresh mayonnaise, pickles, cucumber, cilantro and chile,” writes Andrea Nguyen in her 2014 book, The Banh Mi Handbook: Recipes for Crazy-Delicious Vietnamese Sandwiches . “Somewhere along the line, the term bánh mì came to signal not only bread but the ubiquitous sandwich.”
Mass emigration in the wake of the Vietnam War has seen the banh mi become synonymous with Vietnamese cuisine, as sandwich lovers the world over have become devotees of the bánh mì’s marriage of crunch and tang. The Vietnamese poet Nguyen Đình Chieu wrote in an 1861 poem that people “splitting sweet wine, gnawing bánh mì” was a common sight in Vietnam in the mid-19th century and now, in the 21st century, this merry act is replicated across the globe on a daily basis, cementing the sandwich’s place as a culinary icon.
Bánh mì were mostly found at Vietnamese-owned restaurants, groceries and convenience stores serving Vietnamese communities in New Orleans East and on the West Bank before Katrina hit in 2005. As the city rebuilt, Vietnamese restaurants opened in new parts of town. Today you can find bánh mì in restaurants across New Orleans, and on menus all over the Gulf Coast. This one is from Trinh “Lilly” Vuong’s eponymous restaurant, Lilly’s Cafe (in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans), which is a favorite of many at Rouses Markets.
