Kitchen Chat

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

Posted on: 15.10.2009