Shall I Compare Thee to a Vietnamese Hoagie?

Aside from a few dusty historians of Famous Roads and the odd admirer of columns and plumbing, there aren't as many people crowing about the marvels of colonialism as there used to be. Except for Sarkozy and the French right wing, perhaps. Which brings me to my point: here we are marking fully sixty years of active decolonization, and the foodies seem to be caught living in the past. For like mushrooms after a forest fire, foodies thrive in the aftermath of colonial encounters. From the Gin and Tonic to Thanksgiving Dinner-- I won't even mention atrocities like wasabi mashed potatoes and tunaburgers-- the creolization of kitchenstuffs is the by-product of all kinds of international pillage, whether mercantile borrowing or downright invasion. Empires expand, invade, and crumble. And the gastronomes are there, devouring the residue with ethnophilic glee.

How is one to feel about this?

I say: give praise to the Vietnamese Hoagie.

I have a theory here. The Vietnamese Hoagie, a hybrid of French baking and Vietnamese flavor management, is more than a simple colonial fancy. Rather, its presentation of the freshest indigenous ingredients— daikon, cucumber, basil, cilantro, mint, lime, and fish sauce— in tandem with a French pâté sandwich can be seen as a sub rosa response to the French occupation of Indochine. A long, thin, missile of flavor with the portability of a Parisian worker's lunch-on-the-go, this is a sandwich that shows the battle of appropriation to be two-sided.

Colonial administrators tend not to be the most reliable cooks, after all. In the kitchens, prep-cooks and minions rush around, thinking on the fly, finding ingredients where they must. I'm not saying that all kitchen workers, colonizer and colonized alike, share the same experience and thus form the heart of the global proletariat. Simply this: in all the hubbub, what comes to the fore is the question of available resources. Whenever Frenchie imports, or imposes, a cadre of professional bakers, this becomes a new resource for Vietnamese cooks. A new sandwich is born. Thus the French colonial policy of assimilation doesn't just work in one direction here: Vietnamese cuisine could, and did, rummage through the cultural belongings of the French. And they found the baguette.

I've been making a version of this Vietnamese hoagie for some years now, and I must say I'm looking forward to eating one made by someone else; but that will have to wait. Tonight, I've assembled the makings for my own bowdlerized version of this majestic artifact, and I will be putting them together shortly. It's become something of a staple around the house, and it's one of H's favorites.

There are three basic steps, each of which can be simplified or elaborated depending on resources, fatigue level, etc.

1) The fish sauce. Make a couple of tablespoons of simple syrup-- the microwave is fine for this. Add the juice of a lime, and a tablespoon or two of any good nam pla-type fish sauce, to taste. You can then either add a pinch of shredded pickled carrots and daikon, and/or peanuts, which would be more or less traditional. Or you could whisk in a dollop of a store-bought chile sauce with peanuts I use out of abject laziness.

2) The bread. Warm a good baguette in the oven at 300°, but not for so long as to make the bread brittle. And seriously, it has to be a good baguette. If you don't have a good baguette, then the whole deal is off. Get rice noodles instead and make a Bún.

3) The fixings. Assemble the meaty bits: a pâté of some variety, and/or tofu skin, and/or the lovely little spicy tofu chunks we use, and/or other fillings (shrimp, ham, head cheese, etc). With a mandoline, thinly slice daikon and peeled cucumber to line the sandwich, and clean a handful each of mint, thai basil, and cilantro. You can also slice some green onions lengthways and lay them across the top of the sandwiches.

The assembly is quite simple, but the trick is limiting the fillings so that the hoagie remains elegant and intact, or at least manageable. This almost never happens at home. But then almost noone is watching us eat at home. Slice the bread lengthwise, spread with a little butter and pâté (note that in our case tonight this will be the leftover pâté from the other night's Beef Wellington). Line the bread with the sliced vegetables, add any additional meat or tofu fillings, lay the herbs across the top, and season with the fish sauce. Or feel free to drown it with fish sauce at table, if this happens to be your fancy.

As with a lot of street food, the assembly is easy if the ingredients are all in place beforehand. Indeed, the whole dish might be considered a sandwich composed entirely of leftover meat and the standard mise-en-place for much Vietnamese cooking.

In all, an honorable sandwich. And thus:
Remember Dien Bien Phu! Remember Saigon! But remember the sandwich vietnamien!

A Polemical Afterthought:

Gastronomes are, of course, beginning to exercise their own form of anti-colonialism, but one more fitting their immediate needs. The invasion of fast-food chains into lush gastronomic paradises like New York, Paris, and the like may indeed be a form of colonial invasion in its own right (viz. the "McDonaldization" or "Starbuckization" of the world). But I would say-- perhaps a bit cynically-- that the foodies are getting excited largely because the indigenous economies being supplanted tend to be delicious. It's a politics based, we might say, on flavor rather than fervor. I'm not against them-- I'm all for slow foods, locally grown produce, fresh-killed and hand-fed meats, and the like-- but I do mistrust the tendency for much food journalism to label this a "trend" rather than a movement. The measure, ironically, of this movement is its ability to produce tasty food over a sustained period— which means, joking aside, something quite real: an economic commitment to learning the crafts of cheesemaking, baking, brewing, organic farming, and cooking. At this point it's no longer just a fad, but a way of life.