21.10.2009
Pop-up Bánhmì11 stall in Camden Lock Market, Saturdays and Sundays from 24 October to 8 November, 2009
For a while we have been wondering about this show
In our heads picturing how it will flow
Looks to us like we have gathered a team
Can we not make it come true then, this dream?
So last week the way things turned out
Is that “Go West” is what it is all about
At Camden making banh mi together we will try
To see if spreading our wings we can really fly
Alone we are not sure we can stand this test
But so far luck has brought us to work with the best
A Spring from the South brings the beauty of photography
And a friend from years past marked us in digital geography
Three trading sessions mean several times more food
Can we cook all that fresh and maintain a good mood?
Oh goodness and how do we deal with the stall display?
With the big boys, is this really a gamble we can play?
All these questions are still spinning in our mind
But our guts tell us this chance is one of a kind
Faith is what we need, with our hearts to believe
And indeed with hard work, succcess, together we shall conceive!
P/S: This is what we call a ”frog poem” in Vietnamese 
Photo Credits: Duong Anh Xuan
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15.10.2009
For Bánhmì11, cooking is a means to an end, eating.
One of the biggest difference in running a stall selling food, compared to let’s say, organic soaps, is that you spend a lot of time preparing. It may seem obvious but for some reason, but it did not click to us when we started out, just how much cooking we will be doing for one day’s trading. First we started cooking on Friday night, then we started on Thursday and now we start on Tuesday.
Cooking in Bánhmì11’s kitchen is a slow and painstaking process, from the rhythmic beat of mortar and pestle pounding spices together to the whistle of the pressure cooker as the steaming hot container is lifted out and into a cold water bath. There is no short cut, just a string of small movements that must be followed meticulously. The recipe is a blue print, but cooking means looking away from the written words and at what’s stirring in the pot, what’s browning in the oven, and touching the tenderness of the meat, the crunchiness of the vegetables, the softness of tofu and mushroom, and feeling the heat of the pan, the coolness of fresh water, and smelling the scent of cinnamon simmering in red wine. It’s a sensory experience that is all consuming, that asks for your full focus and attention, that intertwines the mind and the heart and the body, like playing an instrument, in this case literally with pots and pans.
But cooking would be so easy if it was so soothing all the time. The truth is cooking is tiring – perhaps the last bastion of manual labor. Rolling pork takes strong hands, cutting out kilos of fat takes stamina, and standing up all day gives you a sore back. It’s exasperating, like that week when we went through twenty-three iterations of making pate to find the right recipe and reach the right texture. And sometimes it’s terrifying, like when we turned off the wrong stove and burned the chicken the night before market day, and had to start all over again. It’s an odd human triumph in the fight to keep food from perishing. It’s nature’s measure of its power, of showing you surprises and reflecting your most honest state of mind. It’s so difficult to cook a good meal when you are tired, or angry, or bitter and bored and it’s so effortless for food to taste good when you are unburdened and untroubled.
So the reason you cook, apart from satisfying a twice-a-day necessity to stay alive, is because you care. And usually it extends beyond yourself, since one rarely bothers to cook just for oneself. Our moms always complain but then they cook again every day, each meal as elaborate as the last one, in solitary silence except for the spinning of the ventilating fan. It’s not so much what’s enjoyed over the stove as what’s relished at the table. This is the one hour in the day when we sit together and chat. So in a way, cooking is always an act of preparation, of getting ready for something more intimate, more sharing and receiving.
Cooking is also about growing, and becoming independent, both as a literal act of being capable of feeding oneself, and metaphorically about coming out of the shadow of a parent. Almost every food memory starts with a matriarch figure, the mother or grandmother, stirring and sweating in a dim, hot kitchen, and you tugging at their feet, nearly invisible in a hurried chaos. And as we grow up, we move from the sink, peeling root vegetables and washing leaves, to the stove, mixing and blanching and concocting. This is where the transformation happens, where ingredients become dish, plants become nutrition and little girls become women.
When you are in the business of cooking, the pressure surmounts. The mistakes are hard to be forgiven. But the pleasure is the same, some of it is in cooking and most of it is in serving our food. In seeing customers’ reactions, in meeting people who come back to order more, in watching people share a Vietnamese baguette for the first time, in hearing our banh mi become a conversation topic, in knowing that the stall is a place to get together. That’s when food gains its soul, through the life that’s breathed in by the people who make it and the people who eat it.
That’s perhaps when we meet eye-to-eye over the counter not as roles, vendor and customers, but as persons, with first names. When we hear the longing for conversation in the voice of the middle-aged woman who comes at the end of the day, asking about the difference between artichoke and ginger and ginseng teas. When we catch a glimpse of curiosity in the child who stretches his arm toward the banh mi in the cart’s glass window, as his parent is dragging him away. When we watch people holding their banh mi warm in their hands, pulling it up from the baguette bag, pressing the bread together, examining and smelling before taking their first bite.
We love cooking. But we don’t love it because of the recipes, or the ingredients, or how aesthetically pleasing it is (which by the way is not always true, especially when you cooking with fresh liver and pork belly). We love cooking because we get to eat, and other people get to eat, and that in itself is a joyful and beautiful thing. Now there will be a pile of dishes to be washed, utensils to be cleaned and the floor to be mopped. And we can’t keep track of whether we just cooked for twenty people or a hundred and twenty and we just know that the endless cycle restarts every week. But still the sound of the crusty bread cracking in our hands, the succulent flavors of pate and roast pork and crunchy carrots, excite and satisfy us every time. We suppose that momentary sensation happens to every one, at least once, that’s why they come back. We certainly hope so.
Photo Credits: Phuong N. Nguyen
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09.10.2009
How Bánhmì11 celebrated our first Mid-autumn in London
Saturday was possibly the windiest day thus far this year. It also happened to be the eighth full moon of the lunar calendar and to celebrate Trung Thu, the Mid-autumn festival, Bánhmì11 put together our first event. Blocking the wind from the stall with two trolleys, shielding the oven and gas stove with a large collapsed carton box, we wondered if the wind would really let us keep the food warm. Rob had put double-weight under the umbrellas and double-clipped them next to each other, like connecting compartments in a beehive. When a big wind blew over, the entire construction shook, we retreated into the back of our collars and everyone froze for a moment, but despite the occasional pause; the strings held, the umbrellas withstood the wind and the stall continued its rhythmic activities until the end of the day. In the gusty wind, barely warm enough with our scarves, we put up decorations and the lanterns hung from pole to pole, like fragments of our childhood memories lingering under the London sky.
When we were children, Trung Thu was a time to make up with the kid who stole your pencil, to be out in the neighborhood and play tag all day, to forget about doing chores, to ask for our cousins to sleep over, and to stay up really late watching the moon. For weeks, we would have been picking out our lanterns, trading them with the other children, pleading with aunties and uncles to buy us yet another star-shaped one, with just the right color combination, lots of glitter, and lots of trimmings. When night falls, we lit our lanterns and went around our small alleys singing Mid-autumn songs, proud and loud like a well-rehearsed marching band, raising our lanterns toward the sky, or moving them on the ground so they spinned, wearing animal face masks and beating enthusiastically on drums. Under the moonlight, it was a spellbinding show and we participated with such intentional preparation, such ritualistic seriousness and such energetic excitement that made Mid-autumn night truly magical.
Growing up and going away from home, all these activities have faded away but the one thing that remains is that whenever possible, we always eat mooncake and this simple act alone, is enough to remember the spirit of Trung Thu. Before Saturday, we couldn’t eat any of the mooncakes, saving them for big day but we went back and forth over debating which type is really the best- shiny crispy golden banh nuong, or gooey white glutinous rice banh deo, and compounding our conundrum trying to figure out which combination of fillings is the tastiest, mung bean and lotus seed, or coconut and sesame, or egg yolk and sausage. On the day, we cut the mooncakes into small pieces, the way old people usually take them with tea, and shared them around. Perhaps the pastries looked a bit strange, if you haven’t seen them before, but for us last Saturday was as an authentic taste of Trung Thu as you could have ever tried.
No one knows when Mid-autumn became a children’s festival in the Far East, just like how Halloween is the most exciting event for children in the West. Somehow, when we tried to remember what growing up was like, those Mid-autumn nights always came to mind as the most vivid, magical moments and we kept walking down memory lane searching for more. In the colorful fabric of our childhoods, the songs, the lanterns, the stories of Trung Thu were the uncanny threads that stringed the years together. Because of this, we wanted to organize Trung Thu as an early Halloween, to share some of our joys growing up with the lovely children who visit our stall. We noticed that there are a lot of children who visit our stall, but often times they are left out of what we have to offer. They are not allowed to drink coffee and they eat bánh mì with only butter or pate. This was an occasion for us to spoil them with sweet moon cakes, colorful lanterns and fun animal face masks to share and play with others. As for treating the grown-ups, there was plenty of xoi xeo sticky rice, summer rolls goi cuon and chicken salad with Vietnamese herbs that our fabulous girlfriends helped making the night before. The only trouble was that we run out of food too early, so hopefully you got there in time for some mooncake!
London weather has a way of making mid-autumn seem almost like mid-winter, and we could see the soup taking longer to heat up and the bread growing cold and hard more quickly. But being amidst the hanging lanterns, seeing the children at the stall running around with their masks, we were reminded of how as children, we took everything around us more seriously than ourselves, believing in the things our eyes never saw, and through our imagination, every mindless thing came to life. Looking at the moon on Mid-autumn night, we really saw a boy sitting under a big banyan tree, looking down on us, just like the legend has it. We wish that somehow, for ourselves and those who work with us, looking forward and upward, we can see a vision of Bánhmì11 with the same childlike conviction and clarity, and together, we can turn it into a reality.
Photo Credits: Hoa Nguyen
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