potonthefire

by Pot On The Fire Free(Lit)

  The making of wine melds together two of the most potent middle-class American yearnings—to connect to a particular piece of land and to possess a totally absorbing, challenging, and, at the same time, very competitive avocation. This is why airline pilots, brain surgeons, and corporate lawyers emerge from their midlife crises as vineyard owners: it’s the same stress level as before, only now they’re having much more fun.

  This isn’t to say that inside every wine drinker lurks a potential vintner (although maybe there does), only that wine itself—as well as the bottles it comes in, even the corks that plug them up—is charged with evocative significations of place, at least for those who can tune in to that wavelength. I can, a little, but I mostly feel it passing me by. I can love a place but cannot wholly entrust myself to it, because—as I explain at length elsewhere in this book—I lack the capacity to sink down roots, even pretend ones. My loyalty is to the individual, never to the whole.

  This, then, is where I’ve gotten in my struggle to know wine—and where I haven’t. I’ve found some bottles that I enjoy tremendously; I’ve found much to think about along the way. But I now know that wine drinking will never become as intimate a part of my life as, say, reading or cooking. Wine wants something of me that I’m simply unable to give. Because of that, I’m destined to remain on the outside looking in … which is to say, knowing wine only one bottle at a time.

  BANH MI & ME

  There are at least three small Asian markets in easy driving range of our apartment here in Northampton, but my favorite sits in a tiny, shabby minimall just across the bridge over the Connecticut River. There it shares space with an adult-movie rental outlet, whose much larger road sign is usually defaced by advocates of family values. As I wait beside it for a break in the traffic to ease my car back onto the highway, I endure knowing looks from occupants of passing vehicles who have appraised me—middle-aged, bearded, white, male—and passed their judgment. But the bright pink plastic bag that sits beside me on the front seat is the only lurid aspect of my shopping trip. Its contents are exotic in an entirely different sense: packets of rice noodles, a bottle of oyster or fish sauce, a few cans of coconut milk, and, if I’m very lucky, one or two Vietnamese sandwiches trucked in that day all the way from Boston.

  When, on my second or third visit to the store, I first came across a small pile of these sandwiches in the store’s drinks cooler (I was burrowing around for a can of a Taiwanese coffee beverage called Mr. Brown—another story), I had no idea what they were. I also had no hesitation in giving one a try. It would be nice to write that I already knew that the Vietnamese had acquired a taste for French bread and French charcuterie during the colonial occupation and that what I held in my hand might be a sample of both. But the truth is that I have a weakness for anything that comes packaged in a French roll. I bought one, took it out to the car, ate it, and went straight back in and bought another. One bite and I knew that I was onto a good thing.

  Exactly whatsort of good thing, though, it would take me a while to determine. The roll—the size and shape of a small sub roll—had a resilient crust and a light, chewy interior. It enfolded a slice each of two different kinds of cold cut—one pink-colored, the other grayish-white, both of them unfamiliar to me. On top of these were slices of carrot and cucumber, and lots of fresh coriander. The inside of the roll was spread on one side with mayonnaise and on the other with … something else.

  Since by the time I noticed this I was on the road, I could only analyze the other substance with my tongue. It was gelatinous and full of little bits of what tasted like crumbled chicken liver. When I got home, I examined a smear of it left on the wrapping. It was opaque, a light-tan color, and as utterly baffling in its composition as it was delicious to eat. This was definitely something that required serious investigation.

  It goes almost without saying that I returned to the market for another round the very next day; it also goes almost without saying that there was not a sandwich in the store—not that day, nor for several following days. Soon the Vietnamese clerk, a brusque young man who spoke exactly enough English to suit himself, simply assumed a “him again” expression when the large bearded white man came rushing in, stood for a moment disconsolately staring into the drinks cooler, groaned, and slunk back out the door.

  Then, one day, there they were. I swept up an armful and carried them over to the cash register. I held one up and asked the clerk what it was called. He gave me the sort of look reserved for askers of truly stupid questions and answered shortly, “SANN-wich.” And, to this day, between the two of us, things have advanced no further. (Me, on the telephone: “SANN-wich today?” Him, in response: “No, no. Maybe Thursday.”) But I had other resources. I had cookbooks. And, of course, I had the Internet.

  The first question that comes to mind when encountering a new dish is, What am I eating? But in this instance that “what” was a very complicated matter. Here was something completely familiar—a sandwich—given a series of intriguing twists. The vegetables, cut into long, thin strips, added a pleasing crispness; the coriander provided an electric herbaceousness. The cold cuts were unfamiliar, but it was an unfamiliarity characterized by mildness rather than unusual flavor—they lacked the sour/bitter aftertaste that mars so much American charcuterie. If, at that moment, I had been asked to put all this into an equation, I would have offered the following:

  fresh coriander + carrot & cucumber slices + good French-style roll + delicate cold cuts + mayonnaise + ???? = X

  with “????” representing the mystery substance with the chewy bits. I had been a terrible algebra student, God knows, but I learned enough to know that an equation with two unknowns is a fearsome thing. It was time to go on-line.

  I had already e-mailed a few people who I thought might be able to help me out. Jim Leff, ace New York restaurant explorer, pointed me to a series of interchanges at his chowhound.com. bulletin board. I myself might have written the query that had started the chain: “What is a Vietnamese sandwich? Has anyone got a recipe?”

  There was only one reply—but it was enough to set me on my way, and to warn me that the water I was about to enter was deeper than I had thought:

  Ah!Banh mi in detail. French rolls/baguettes with five-spice chicken, pork, or meatballs with grated carrot, some kind of sliver of a white vegetable (daikon radish?), jalapeño pepper (optional), with classic Vietnamese dipping sauce poured onto the sandwich. I don’t think there’s any lettuce. They’re kind of small. Usually it takes two to fill me up. Vietnamese iced coffee is a good accompaniment.

  Five-spice chicken? Meatballs? Daikon radish? “Classic” dipping sauce? My equation was clearly going to need some tweaking. But at least I now had the thing’s name:banh mi .7I e-mailed Bob Lucky, writer/editor ofThe Asian Foodbookery (see page 58), and asked him if he could tell me what the two words meant. He could.Banh mi , he told me, meant “wheat bread.” At least,banh is a word that denotes “cake,” “pie,” “bread,” or “pastry,” andmi is the word for “wheat”; by itself, it can mean simply “wheat noodle,” as in the Chinese wordmein.

  Perhaps “baked wheat thing” better captures the multiple meanings inherent in the phrase, while “French-style bread/roll stuffed with something good” is probably the connotative meaning for many Vietnamese.Banh mi , in other words, is the way they say “sandwich”—the exact translation offered to me by the Vietnamese grocery clerk.

  However, in the short distance the word had traveled from him to me, its meaning had subtly changed. In Vietnam, as in other Third World countries, the focus of the meal is the starch, in this instance the bread. Here, when we order a sandwich, our attention is directed to what fills it; the word, after all, takes its name from the Earl of Sandwich, who delighted in the fact that this arrangement allowed him to eat his roast beef and play whist at the same time.

  I had wantedbanh mi to be like “cheeseburger,” a unique descriptive term that I could utter in any Vietnamese sandwich joint and be reasonably co
nfident as to what I would receive. This, as often happens in life, would prove to be at once true and untrue.

  Since my Vietnamese cookbooks were of little help in mybanh mi research, I went back to the Internet. There isn’t exactly a treasure trove of information waiting there to be discovered, but if you keep on searching, you do learn some things. One of my more interesting finds was a piece byLos Angeles Times reporter Barbara Hansen on her eating experiences in Vietnam in the early nineties. Most mornings, she wrote, she breakfasted on

  a plate of silky rice dough wrappers stuffed with ground meat, topped with bean sprouts, cilantro and other greens, and slices of what the Vietnamese call pork pie, a finely textured cold cut…. But one morning I stopped instead at a wooden cart laden with French rolls. The quality of the French bread here is astounding. Nowhere in Los Angeles have I found bread that can compare. Racks of it were set out here and there in Ho Chi Minh City. At this cart, I orderedbanh mi. The woman vendor split the bun, dabbed on pâté, added bits of charcuterie, marinated carrot, jicama strips, cucumber slices, cilantro, a cloud of pepper, and thin chile sauce. It was a fantastic bundle of food for fifteen cents.

  Jicama, if you haven’t tried it, is a root vegetable that, when eaten raw, has a crisp, bland succulence somewhere between a radish’s and a water chestnut’s. That a sidewalk vendor might not add mayonnaise (or “American bean paste,” as one Vietnamese endearingly remembers calling it as a child) comes as no surprise; that in Vietnambanh mi is considered breakfast food does, a bit. It turns out that in America, as well as in Ho Chi Minh City, manybanh mi places open at the crack of dawn to serve thebanh-mi -and-coffee crowd, hurrying to work.

  Most of the other mentions came from restaurant reviews. In the best of these, an exploration of Vietnamese sandwich shops in San Francisco written for www.sidewalk.com. Sharon Silva pretty much describes the lay of the land for the novicebanh mi enthusiast:

  At midday in the tiny, simple Saigon Sandwich Shop on Larkin Street, hungry yet patient customers waiting in a long line slowly make their way to the counter to order from among a half-dozen choices:banh mi thit (roast pork),banh mi xiu mai (pork meatballs),banh mi cha lua (so-called “fancy pork,” a kind of steamed pork loaf—and an acquired taste for some Westerners),banh mi pate gan (a liver pâté),banh mi ga (grilled chicken) andbanh mi thit cha pate (a pork/pâté combination). No matter which version you order, the construction is basically the same: a large, crusty French roll (sometimes lightly toasted) smeared with a flavorful mayonnaise knockoff, then layered with pickled carrot and daikon slices, white onion rings, sprigs of coriander, fiery cross sections of green chiles, and your choice of meat. Sometimes a little cucumber and tomato turn up, too, as well as a shake or two of Maggi Sauce, the Swiss condiment that traveled to Vietnam with the French and is found in every Vietnamese pantry from Hanoi to Houston.8

  However, it was Pittsburgh research librarian Jeff Fortescue who actually got me out on the road, pointing me to a review at boston. citysearch.com. of a small take-out Vietnamese restaurant in downtown Boston called Banh Mi:

  The real draw here is the freshly prepared Vietnamese sandwich, a crisp French roll laden with pork and fresh vegetables. The roll is first heated, then a ground pork pâté is slathered on, followed by slices of two different types of Southeast Asian pork cold cuts (one looks like headcheese, the second like liverwurst), shredded carrots, sliced cucumbers, shards of fresh chile pepper, and sprigs of cilantro. The result is texturally pleasing and appetite-appeasing. If you find mystery meat unnerving, they also serve a vegetable sandwich, sans pork.

  Shortly thereafter, I was standing at that counter myself, ordering half a dozen to go, at two dollars apiece. The Vietnamese proprietress offered me the choice of chile pepper hot or not, and since I would be sharing this bounty with two nephews, I chose three of each. As she assembled the order, I looked around, trying to take in as much as I could.

  In this sort of situation, I am always bombarded by an overload of impressions that I need time and distance to sort out. Here that feeling was aggravated by the fact that I was double-parked outside (downtown Boston is your worst parking nightmare). I had been in the store barely a minute, and already my brain was reeling.

  I had expected to find something like a deli counter—with cold cuts and cooked meats on display. Instead, beside the counter was a large glass case holding a huge assortment of those pastel-drenched Asian pastries that look as if they glow in the dark. Beneath these was a refrigerator case containing, among other things, loaf-shaped, string-tied packages, with labels in Vietnamese. These parcels, I would come to realize later, contained various kinds of Vietnamese charcuterie. But right then they were nothing more than elements of that rush of confused impression whose name is foreignness. Dazed, I took my plastic sack stuffed withbanh mi and fled.

  However, once the car was nosing its way back to the suburbs, my head began to clear. Or, more accurately, that peculiarbanh mi aroma of hot French bread and fresh coriander had started to work its magic, comforting the spirit even as it drew my right hand into the bag. How warm and crusty these sandwiches felt. How accessible they were, in their loose waxed-paper wrapping secured with a tiny rubber band. A moment later my shirt front was covered with brittle flakes of crust, and my mouth was experiencing a slow burn. I had grabbed one of the three sandwiches laden with slices of raw chile pepper.

  The burn in my mouth only increased my happiness.This was howbanh mi was meant to be eaten: absolutely fresh from the making. The outside of the roll was toasty and crisp; the interior was cool and full of flavors, a complex mix of the soft and the crunchy, the brightly (fiery!) piquant and the unctuously rich. The cold cuts were definitely an element of the sandwich’s goodness, but, in truth, perhaps not the most important one. Western cold cuts are meant to dominate a sandwich; these were meant to fall into harmony with everything else. If you left them out, you might lose the backup group, but the sandwich itself would go right on singing.

  Right then, I understood something aboutbanh mi that made me laugh. It was, after all, the Vietnamese translation of a common French snack, and here I was, with my meat hunt, trying to translate it back into French, or really into American Vietnamese French. This, of course, was the tug of my appetite and fifty-odd years of cultural conditioning, but I was being yanked past what I actuallyliked aboutbanh mi . If this kept up, I would find myself right back at French bread spread with pâté, with maybe a sprig or two of fresh coriander to add a touch of—what would one call it?—well, maybeVietnamienerie.

  A week or so after this event, a friend and I drove over to the Vietnamese neighborhood in Springfield. I had gone there looking for pâté, but it was lunchtime and the view through the window of Saigon Pho was very enticing—a small room full of Vietnamese, alone or in groups, hunched over bowls of noodles and broth. Inside, we found that the menu offered a few different versions ofpho —Vietnamese beef noodle soup—one distinguished from the other by the number of different sorts of beef cuts included. I ordered thepho with everything: beef brisket, beef tendon, beef meatballs, and strips of rare steak.

  In a few moments, our waiter brought us a plate heaped with bean sprouts, whole branches of basil leaves, lime quarters, and slices of hot pepper, to be added as we wished to our soup. Then he brought thepho itself: two large steaming bowls of clear broth in which floated rice noodles, strips of scallion, fresh coriander leaves, and paper-thin slices of those different kinds of beef.

  If I had been in a beef-craving mood, I would have been rather disappointed—one or two determined swoops of my porcelain spoon would have caught up every meat shred in the bowl. In fact, I was quite happy with what I received—it was delicious and filling—but I did think about this paradoxical situation as I ate.

  The versions ofpho the restaurant served—and the prices charged for them—were determined by the variety, not the amount, of beef you got in a bowl. Meat was central to the dish, to be sure; it was just that that centrality had nothing e
specially to do with quantity—which, to a Westerner like myself, seemed a very Zen-like notion. The meat was as much a spiritual as a physical presence in the dish. I silently renamed it “meat-blessed noodles in broth.”

  I finished my Vietnamese iced coffee (two glasses are brought to your table, one filled with ice, the other with an inch of condensed milk at the bottom and a small metal drip coffeemaker set on the top. When the coffee finishes dripping onto the condensed milk, you stir the two layers together and pour this over the ice in the other glass. The result is unexpectedly delicious) and we drove over to Saigon Market, several blocks away. There I found a refrigerator case full ofbanh mi , packaged in plastic bags and set vertically into milk-bottle cases. Each bag held—separate from the sandwich—a bright red, fresh Thai hot pepper and some shredded carrot packaged in a little plastic bag.

  It was a hot Saturday afternoon, and the atmosphere was quiet, even sleepy. I felt free to root around. In a freezer case I found a hoard of Vietnamese cold cuts, mostly various brands of the notoriouscha lua (“fancy pork”), a mild pork loaf seasoned withnuoc mam, as well as a few other similarly shaped but differently named pork loaves. I bought one made of pork and pig’s ear.

  However, I didn’t see any pork liver pâté. I asked the pleasant-faced woman at the checkout counter about this, and she led me to a freezer case. “I buy by whole loaf and slice here,” she explained, pointing to a stack of plastic-wrapped anonymous-looking slabs that I had utterly missed during my survey. I promptly added one to my shopping basket. By the time I set out for home, I was feeling a kind of Sherlock Holmes-ian satisfaction: the pieces of the puzzle were finally falling into place.