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[ID: A baguette cut open lengthwise and filled with cucumber, cilantro, carrots, and seitan. End ID]

Bánh mì thịt nướng sả chay (Vietnamese sandwich with lemongrass seitan)

Strictly speaking, "bánh mì," literally meaning "wheat-based loaf," is a type of bread that can be dressed in many different ways: with margarine and sugar, with jam, with eggs, or with various sandwich fillings. The addition of ingredients such as butter, cold cuts or grilled meat, fresh vegetables, pickles, and savory sauce to one of these loaves creates a "bánh mì Sài Gòn" ("Saigon banh mi"), often simply called "bahn mi" in English.

Bánh mì sandwiches may also be referred to more specifically by the type of filling they contain, as with bánh mì thịt (bánh mì with meat), bánh mì thịt nướng (with grilled meat), bánh mì thịt nguội (with cold meat), bánh mì chay (with vegetables), and so on. These sandwiches are eaten as breakfast and snack foods in Vietnam, and in places with large Vietnamese diasporic populations.

This recipe is for a vegetarian (chay) bánh mì sandwich. Seitan is fried in an aromatic sauce made with shallot, lemongrass, galangal, and turmeric root for a delicate, complex, earthy flavor. A tart, creamy mayonnaise-based spread, hot chili peppers, fresh vegetables, and soy sauce complete the five-way balance between sweet, spicy, sour, bitter, and salty.

From France to Saigon

Like the bánh mì rolls themselves, some of the typical fillings in the bánh mì Sài Gòn were introduced to southern Vietnam by French colonizers in the 1860s, and were then ‘Vietnamized’ with local ingredients and techniques.

Take pâté for example. Food scholar Vu Hong Lien writes that it started as a novelty food in Vietnam: it was sold in restaurants owned by French colonists, but was too expense for most Vietnamese people to afford. Vietnamese experimentation and innovation created the ba tê that "soon became daily fare" in the south: in essence, it was pâté modified according to Vietnamese taste. While French pâté had a base of ground liver, ba tê generally used pork and pork fat; ba tê added garlic, fish sauce (nước mắm), and sometimes Chinese five-spice (ngũ vị hương) to the black pepper, nutmeg, and herbs typically used in pâté; ba tê was usually steamed, where pâté was baked.

Similar transformations occured with French sausage ("saucisson") and ham ("jambon"; Vietnamese "giấm bỗng"). The Vietnamese already had experience in sausage-making as a result of Chinese culinary influence. Ham, however, "was not an easy food to re-create locally, because the meat had first to be cured," which was not possible in Vietnam's climate (Lien). Vietnamese cooks instead created thịt nguội (cold meat) by marinating, pan-roasting, and thinly slicing pork shoulder or belly. The resulting cold cut "took off spectacularly and became the dominant feature of all Vietnamese sandwiches" (ibid.).

By the early 20th century, stalls in Hồ Chí Minh city were cutting French-style baguettes into smaller lengths, splitting them open, and filling them with pâté, cucumber, đồ chua (pickled daikon and carrot), and thịt nguội or saucisson, to form a convenient sandwich called "bánh mì Sài Gòn" (after its birthplace, then Saigon). "Posher" versions of the sandwich—made on specially baked oval rolls, then filled with sốt bơ trứng, roast chicken or giấm bỗng, lettuce, tomato, and scallion—were being sold in shops by the 1950s. Bánh mì stalls, in order to compete with the shop sandwiches, added mayonnaise and ba tê to their offerings, as well as cilantro (coriander), red chili, and light soy sauce (Lien).

Other available fillings included meatballs or tinned sardines in tomato sauce; Laughing Cow spreadable cheese; and, as of 1954, cheddar cheese. The cheddar bánh mì, or bánh mì phô mai (from the French "fromage," meaning "cheese"), was inexpensive, but took a while to catch on.

The story of this cheddar cheese has to do with the partiton of Vietnam. The United States had been providing funding and personnel for French military ambitions in "Indochina" in fear of the communist threat represented by the Việt Minh since 1950, but it was not enough. By 1954, France, depleted of military personnel and money, could not continue surpressing the Việt Minh's struggle for independence. The Geneva Conference dealt with the division of the French empire and the transfer of power in the wake of the First Indochina War: one of the consequences was that Vietnam was divided into northern and southern nations, with the socialist Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) to the north, and the Western Bloc-aligned Việt Nam Cộng hòa to the south.

Several waves of migration then occurred, as northerners including Catholics and counter-revolutionaries, fearing religious persecution or reprisal from the DRV's government, moved south, and thousands of Vietnamese in the south, including Việt Minh guerrilla fighters, moved north. The northerners who had moved south received French food aid in the form of powdered milk, tinned meat—and cheddar cheese. The cheese, however, was unfamiliar and undesirable, and many refugees ended in selling it cheaply, or giving it away. Enterprising bánh mì stall owners began incorporating the cheese into their offerings.

A New Cuisine in New Orleans

U.S. military intervention in Vietnam continued during the Second Indochina War (also known as the Vietnam War). After U.S. withdrawal in 1973, and the North Vietnamese capture of Saigon in 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese emigrated to places including the United States, Canada, Australia, and France. Bánh mì were popular amongst Vietnamese populations almost everywhere they went, due to the simplicity of their preparation and the broad availability of their ingredients.

The U.S, under Presidents Ford and Carter, moved over a hundred thousand Vietnamese refugees into temporary camps, from which some thousands settled, initially or secondarily, in cities that became Vietnamese "ethnic centers." New Orleans was particularly attractive to many refugees, due to its familiar climate, proximity to wetlands, and "French cultural history" (McCulla).

Theresa McCulla argues that Vietnamese refugees "entered New Orleans's cultural world through food." But unlike the city's Sicilian population, who "controlled the public narrative of their ethnic revival project," Vietnamese immigrants did not play an active role in shaping public perception of themselves, their culture, or their cuisine in the years immediately following 1975. Instead, they were portrayed by newspapers as exotic and "profoundly foreign," isolated in surburban areas whose restaurants, vegetable gardens, and food markets could be penetrated by sufficiently adventurous culinary explorers. This foreign-but-approachable characterization bolstered the perception of New Orleans as a "creolizing" society, a sort of "gumbo pot" in which various populations could assimilate while remaining "authentic."

Many elements of the bánh mì Sài Gòn were familiar to New Orlesians already, which aided in the culinary rapprochement. New Orleans was no stranger to the French baguette (see Mizell-Nelson), pâté, or saucisson. Nor was the concept of a meat or seafood sandwich on French bread novel: the "poor boy" sandwich had existed and been so called since at least 1931 (Mizell-Nelson, p. 52); before that, The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book had described an oyster loaf in 1901; and, still earlier, an oyster loaf was described in the 1824 cookbook The Virginia Housewife.

Using seeds brought from Vietnam, or cuttings obtained from family and friends, Vietnamese immigrants created market gardens that grew almost everything essential to a traditional Vietnamese diet: whatever the gardeners did not use was sold to other individuals, to grocery stores, or to restaurants. The lemongrass (sả), galangal (riềng), turmeric (nghệ), and daikon (củ cải) necessary for bánh mì were recorded in Vietnamese market gardens as of the 1990s. Though nobody can agree on who was the first to sell them, bánh mì—marketed as "Vietnamese po' boys"—were amongst the offerings in Vietnamese-owned restaurants in the suburbs of New Orleans by the 1980s. The city's reception of the sandwich was enthusiastic: travel writers were describing the sales pitches of competing "Vietnamese 'po boy'" vendors in their exotifying, ethnographic-style accounts of Vietnamese produce markets before the millennium had turned.

McCulla points out, however, that the New Orleans creolization formula of (conditional) acceptance upon "bringing delicious food to the table" did not work for everyone. Even as Vietnamese arrivals offered "a convenient opportunity for many to proclaim American multiculturalism in action," the political and culinary-cultural situation of poor Black New Orleasians was very different. They faced housing discrimination, or were priced out of buildings they had long lived in (thanks to federal housing assistance, Vietnamese immigrants could pay higher rents), even as their cuisine was more likely to be portrayed as "threatening or burdensome" than as "intriguing." I would add a third pole to the reception of African or Black American influence on "New Orleans" or "Creole" cuisine: namely, that of rewriting and erasure. Anything too central to New Orleans culinary culture to be ignored or dismissed has commonly been attributed to French influence.

The Bánh Mì of the Present

Today, bánh mì stalls are a common sight throughout Vietnam, even in the north of the country. Indoor bánh mì shops, more expensive and seemingly modern than the stalls, still offer young and upwardly-mobile Vietnamese something like a status symbol.

Elsewhere, the popularity, availability, and diversity of bánh mì sandwiches have continued to increase into the 21st century. By 2009, Robert Peyton could write that bánh mì (or "Vietnamese hoagies," or "Saigon subs") had been "making something of a splash" nationwide—some made with "unorthodox" ingredients such as brisket and kielbasa. In New Orleans, one fusion restaurant combines fried gulf shrimp and bò kho (Vietnamese beef stew) with cilantro, cucumber, and đồ chua.

These recipes understand "bánh mì" less as a set of pre-determined ingredients, and more as an ethos. The crispy roll is non-negotiable: but the ingredients that fulfill the roles of moist spread, savory filling, fresh vegetables, spicy chilies, funky pickles, and salty sauce can be swapped out at will, as long as balance is maintained. This raises interesting questions about the multiplex genealogies of various regional cuisines, and when a particular dish is or is not still "itself." What is certain is that the variability of the bánh mì has been a core aspect of its popularity in various geographic settings and economic conditions, and that it is likely to continue so.

Recipe under the cut!

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