Worker bees

Making  bánh mì seems a simple pursuit, but with rules and repetition it can teach us a lot

One small observation about life is that despite how deceptively varied as it seems, much of it is actually repeated. It’s always about you doing something and life undoing it, over and over again. You eat and get hungry and eat again, you sleep and get tired and sleep again, you learn and forget and learn from almost scratch again. So then in general, I think human beings can only achieve something substantial out of a repetitious routine when we are very loved, very pushed or very disciplined.

For the three of us, we have probably relied on a lot of luck and a little of spontaneous intensity to get through life. Now gastronomical discipline means a two-facetted lesson in building a regimented operation to start with and getting chastised for your mistakes as you go along. Another sold-out Saturday last weekend was the result of many days of thought and preparation. It was the same process of mincing and mixing, shredding and soaking, cooling and cutting, all compounded with our hopes and enthusiasm.

Somehow, we were always thinking that at the end of the line, when we have put on the cilantro and sprinkled the chili sauce, bánh mì became a more artful thing, sublimely comforting and surprisingly intriguing. Try to take a Western staple like the baguette and throw “Vietnamese” infront of it, place yourself at the mercy of gourmets of Broadway Market, live up to the expectations and nostalgia for the Tribeca/Williamsburg/13e arrondissemont/Cambramatta bánh mì, and find a pricing point where you don’t have to break your back or bank account to keep the stall running. That must be chased after, yearned for, and worked at like an art.

Getting a regimented operation in place has been our goal for the past weeks. Things moved much faster at the stall last week when we had the oven on maximum capacity and constanly churning out steamingly hot baguettes. It is always interesting when your oven decides it won’t rise beyond 150 degrees when you really need it at 250, and the chemist in the group speculates that you should look at the color of the flame, orange or clear blue, to tell whether the gas tank needs refill. Then Duke of Edinburgh gold medalist fussed around pulling up engineering tricks with the camp stove. All was in vain though. We did however figured out that life is repetitious even in its rules, which in this case is that all good things come in three. Indeed, three is the optimal number of people for our bánh mì production. It takes one to staff the oven, one to stuff the bread before it goes into the oven, and one to stack all the freshness into it after the bread comes out. Last week we were constantly apologizing and thanking people for their patience. This week, people went “Oh it’s mine already?” when we hand them the made-to-order bánh mì as they are still getting their change.

The second part of discipline is of course that is not only an inner strength exercise, but also that you need the outside correction, which not easy to either give or receive. Some of you will know that we really adore Miu, our cat, and we rarely punish him for anything. So now when he makes trouble, I may yell and scream but he doesn’t hear or care. However, he is really scared of bà Trinh and as soon as she raises her voice, he runs away as fast as his four little feet could carry him. When you really love someone, it is all the harder to discipline them and it becomes more of thinking of their own good rather what makes your sappy soul feel good. And on the receiving end, if you ever wonder what all the cacophony behind the cart is about, it’s bà Trinh disciplining us. She gets really upset when we overload the ingredients- and we think we are being generous but actually we are distorting very basic gastronomical precepts.

So having discipline often comes back to a very simple principle: obey the rules. We were born so stubborn and we were raised to rebut rather than adhere. Sometimes though, we just have to learn to let go of ourselves and trust that someone else really does know better.

Posted on: 10.08.2009