Banh mi Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The present-day sandwich form of bánh mì came together in Saigon around the middle of the twentieth century, broadly in the 1950s.

The baguette it rests on was not something Vietnam had of its own. Until wheat bread crossed the sea and took root in this land, a dish built on bread had no way of coming into being. Under French colonial rule, baking arrived and fresh baguettes began to line the streets, and only then were the conditions in place. Once the baguette had entered the Vietnamese table, people began to pack local fillings into it, tucking in pickled vegetables, herbs, meat and pâté so that the whole could be eaten in one hand, a French loaf and Vietnamese fillings settling into a single sandwich. That is bánh mì.

The stage for its making was the Saigon street stall. As a cheap, quick street food eaten standing at the roadside, this portable sandwich spread through the postwar city. Onto the bread form left by France rode the everyday food of ordinary Vietnamese, and at the stall it set into a dish of its own, the offspring of a colonial legacy and local life.

Alongside the origin of the dish, bánh mì carries a well-known way of talking about its name. The 'mì' of 'bánh mì,' it is often said, is a corruption of the French pain de mie, the white sandwich loaf. Since the dish comes from France, so the reasoning runs, the name must come from French too, which sounds plausible enough.

Trace the history of the words, though, and the account falls apart. 'Bánh' is an old word, written in chữ Nôm (the script built from Chinese characters to write Vietnamese) with the character for cake, and it already appears in the Cư trần lạc đạo phú, a work of the late thirteenth century attributed to Trần Nhân Tông. It was in use centuries before any contact with France. 'Mì' refers to wheat. Put together, bánh mì reads as 'wheat bánh,' and there is no basis for taking it as a rendering of the sound of pain de mie. That the dish itself descends from the French baguette is certain, but running the name back to French as well is an association that overreaches.

The written record of the word also predates French rule. Taberd's dictionary Dictionarium Latino-Anamiticum, a Latin-to-Vietnamese dictionary published in 1838, gives 'bánh, bánh mì' as the Vietnamese for the Latin Panis (bread). So bánh mì was already a word for bread before France began taking possession of the country in 1858. Whether the word appears in any earlier dictionary has not been checked. But the bánh mì there is simply 'bread,' not the filled sandwich of today. The year a word enters the record and the year a dish is born are separate matters. For the present sandwich form to appear, the arrival of the baguette (introduced in the later nineteenth century) had to be followed by the postwar work of packing fillings into it to make a portable food.

About the 'very first shop' there is another account. A couple, Lê Minh Ngọc and Nguyễn Thị Tịnh, came south from the north after the country was divided in 1954 and opened a small bakery in Saigon called Hòa Mã. In 1958 it began selling bánh mì with meat (bánh mì thịt), and this, the story goes, was the start of today's sandwich. Hòa Mã is described as one of the early shops to sell bánh mì with meat. But the evidence does not add up to a claim that it was truly the first. French-style sandwiches of ham and butter were already being sold before then.