Vietnam: The Land Of Sandwiches

I used to know a lot about horse racing, but never quite enough to make any money at it. I studied the form, and threw bricks into the dewy turf to test the going each morning, and unwrapped blankets around steaming Lancashire hotpots in the back of my beaten-up old Land Rover in the hope of luring tips from passing insiders. At one point, I even found myself driving to King’s Cross some evenings to buy the next day’s racing papers.

It was quite sad really.

Like I say, I never really got anywhere with racing. But the one thing I did learn is that what you eat at the races says a lot about the food of the country you’re in. I’m not talking about private dining tables and Royal enclosures; I’m talking about the soul food, the comfort food, the snacks of choice - the stuff eaten in the cheaper silver-ring and grandstand enclosures, where 90% of punters go.

You say Kentucky Derby to race-goers and they’ll have the taste of American mustard and fried onions in their mouths, Melbourne Cup and it’ll be the meaty gravy of that ‘proper Aussie pie’ they keep droning on about in ever-ascending sentences, Fairyhouse and it will no doubt be the fatty, breadcrumby taste of disturbingly pink sausages, and Royal Ascot, and it’ll be the tang of smoked salmon, moistening away nicely at the back of the throat with the heavily-buttered brown bread.

But given the overwhelming evidence at Saigon Race Track – one of the very few places in the country that the Vietnamese can legally gamble - the snack of choice here is the sandwich. Alright, there were a couple of stands selling noodles – you can’t go anywhere in this place without falling over a fucking noodle stand – but it’s definitely the sandwich.

Or the banh mi, or bread roll, as it’s known here. A stumpy baguette filled with anything from tinned mackerel in tomato sauce to Laughing Cow cheese to eggs to a few cold cuts and a smear of dubious pate (don’t ask), and always with salad, herbs, sauces, pickles, and a generous scattering of chopped red chillies, that is easily now the most popular form of Vietnamese fast food, overthrowing the traditional pho noodle soup.

I apologise in advance, if I appear obsessive about sandwiches. I wrote an unpublished book on the weighty subject in my hopeful, naive 20s, and have always been fascinated by their history, and the cheerful, parcel-like comfort they offer.

Sandwiches were obviously made well before a hungry John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, ordered an idle butler to stick some meat between two slices, and to hurry up about it, because he didn’t want to waste valuable gambling time leaving the card table. Barbarians were no doubt chucking slabs of rhino between unleavened, fire-baked bread thousands of years before that.

I mean it’s hard to accept that man had invented the printing press before the complexities of the filled bap. But if you do go with it, and say it was Lord Sandwich who invented what we now regard as the sandwich in its modern form, then it makes an interesting journey from his stamping ground in Kent to Saigon Race Track 6,357 miles away in Ho Chi Minh City.

The British statesman made them fashionable, there were rosbif ripples in France, and then finally an uncomfortable acceptance of this entirely new food form that no-one had ever seen or heard of before (obviously with the word ‘le’ wedged before ‘sandwich’ in a typically Franco attempt to save pride, rather than a shoulder-shrugging, philosophical favor that it was just another nail in the coffin of the French language).

Parisians started filling baguettes with pates, and jambon and butter, perhaps with a few cornichons on the side for sharpness and colour, then came brie and squished tomatoes with lots of pepper and sea salt, and then as happened in Britain’s former colonies, France started exporting sandwiches through its empire like rats from ships.

The French took their flour over to Saigon and showed their Vietnamese servants how to make baguettes, and then finally – almost 120 years after the death of John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich - the banh mi was borne. And it’s amazing to think that no-one would have ever invented it, if it hadn’t been for a British aristocrat, whose epitaph should have read "seldom has any man held so many offices and accomplished so little", according to his many critics.

Yes, they embraced the sandwich in Vietnam. And some might say Lord Sandwich has got a lot to answer for, because it shows in the diet. The Vietnamese tend to be much more rotund than their Cambodian and Thai neighbours. Men happily flop their guts out, and lounge around, scratching their balls, counting down the hours till their wives get home from work and they’ve got more money for sandwiches.

And every restaurant menu has its own comprehensive sandwich section, sat awkwardly in a no-man’s land between Western dishes and Vietnamese dishes, like some sort of oil-rich archipelago in the South China Sea, or Eastern Sea if you live in Vietnam, being fought over by two mutually-respecting, but diametrically-opposed culinary rivals.

I even saw a ‘Chef Sandwich’ for sale in one place, and I can only wonder at the uniqueness of the person’s mind that came up with those fillings, let alone the name. Ham, grilled chicken, camembert, black olives, mayonnaise, lettuce, onion, and tomato. Even at $5 - two day’s pay for many people out here - I had to order one, and was soon mopping milky liquid from the melted camembert with a handy baguette.

When I asked, they said it was created by an English chef who’d left the country a few years ago. I don’t know if he was from Kent. But it would be nicely fitting to say he was...and that he’d set up a banh mi stall in Margate or something.

But they don’t deal with outlandish pomp like that at Saigon Race Track, they serve sandwiches the traditional way - a smear of pate, like home-made chicken liver pate but without the fuss, rolled pork belly slices, white sausage, and other things they produce from somewhere in the cart. And then comes the salad - onion, lettuce, tomato and long strips of leathery cucumber, chopped red chillies, mayonnaise and ketchup, and who knows what else crammed in, pushed together, and wrapped in computer print-out paper fastened with elastic bands as though it’s been handed over by a hopper in The Wire.

Or maybe a breakfast banh mi? Two eggs beaten in a bowl, with a little water - the key to any decent omelette. Not that they’re making an omelette as such, as there’s no gooeyness. Instead, they pour a little vegetable oil into a wok and fry the eggs until they have the texture and colour of a shammy leather.

It could be a very ordinary dish, but they add a scattering of sliced onions to the oil before they put the eggs in, and this gives it that sort of big-race, hotdog smell, except without the testacles and colouring, and you’re back at that race course, anywhere in the world, screaming along with the crowd as the horses hit the 1,100 metres pole and the hotdog or the burger or the taco or the kebab or the naan or the SANDWICH is falling out of your hands, and the mustard is already down your shirt, and it’s neck and neck, and your horse finally comes in and the whole afternoon’s saved, and you know you’ve got the money to buy another 10 hotdogs. Or 189 banh mi if you’re in Vietnam.

Cambodia's First Pop-Up Restaurant

Tom was slouched in the lounge, drinking gin. He smiled as I walked in. Not even a thank you. Not even the slightest bit of shame at stealing my recipe. I ordered a sandwich and coffee. As soon as Tom rode off on his scooter, I went into the kitchen. Dee wasn’t there.

“You have chicken curry?” I asked the cooks.

There was a bit of confusion for a while, and then they realised what I was talking about.

“Yes, yes, one you made,” one of them eventually said.

It was impossible. Josh had said they’d sold out. I looked in the fridge. None of the bowls were covered. It was a world away from food premises inspection reports in the UK, and all those tedious manuals to document recipe production steps, and fridge temperatures morning and night.

Then I spotted a portion of what looked like my curry sitting uncovered on the bottom shelf with raw mince above it. I was delighted. The rage evaporated. My bruised ego was restored. They hadn’t nicked my curry recipe after all – not yet anyway.

I met Josh in the street later and he asked about the pork pies again. He said he’d bought some belly and was rendering down the fat in his kitchen at home.

“Got to be right, got to be right,” he said. “Leave it to me.”

I suggested we experimented with the pastry first, filling the pie cases with chopped onions rather than meat. I said they’d still give off moisture, like meat, and it would be cheaper to crack the pastry first before moving on to the filling and jelly. But Josh said pork was cheap enough in Cambodia. It was roughly the same price as chicken breast – about $4.50 a kilo.

I still wasn’t looking forward to the pastry, especially in that cramped kitchen. I needed to find bigger premises. That way I could set up a pop-up restaurant for a few nights, and experiment with the pie pastry at the same time. It would probably be Cambodia’s first pop-up restaurant – there was no sign of another one on the internet.

I asked Rodney if I could use his kitchen (above). It had been well-furnished when he bought the lease two years ago, but he’d ripped it all out and given the equipment to Josh and Tom. But it was big enough and had the basics – two hobs powered by Calor gas, a sink, fridge, shelf space, and a tiny plastic chopping board. It would be fine for pot-based dishes.

And then it came to me. That was it – kebabs. I could start the pop-up with a few kebab nights over the Khmer New Year: Year of the Rabbit to get used to the kitchen. It would give me time to check out food suppliers. Then I could start on more cheffy dishes. There was even an unused bar upstairs that would take 25 covers. Rodney said he was happy for me to put tables up there and do a few pop-up evenings for the many wealthy Belgian expats in town.

They say it takes people a long time in business to discover that you need to make what customers want rather than what you want to make, and I was aware of making that mistake. It would probably be fairly tedious churning out kebabs, but they were the ideal food to get the name out there. You couldn’t get a kebab anywhere in Sihanoukville. The nearest one was a five-hour bus ride away. I knew lamb was hideously expensive, so I’d go for pan-fried chicken doner-style kebabs. I’d made them a number of times in Blighty and they’d always gone down well.

I headed down to the supermarket the next day and bought 2kg of chicken breast, a pot of paprika, salt, white pepper, ketchup, vegetable oil, a decent knife, foil, kitchen paper, a large covered container for the chicken, a bowl for the salad, and three pots with spoons for the sauces.

Then I came across a major problem. The tortilla wraps were $5.50 for ten. It was much more than I was expecting, and they were small round ones, meaning I’d have to sell the kebabs as more of a snack than a meal. I wouldn’t be able to sell them for more than $2.50, meaning a fifth of the food costs would just go on bread. It was disastrous, there was no way I could make a profit. Not that I expected to make any money. Pop-ups are just about marketing really. I thought about making the flat breads myself, but the kitchen was far too hot and underequipped for all that.

I bought two packs of wraps, and reckoned I had just about enough chicken to make 20 kebabs. On the way back, I stopped at the market and bought half a huge white cabbage, tomatoes, cucumber, onions, garlic, limes, and chillies. I’d spent $40 including the tuk tuk fare. If I sold all 20 kebabs, I’d make $10 profit. And then there was Rodney’s share to take into account. We still hadn’t really discussed that.

Rodney chatted away non-stop as I prepped the chicken, and kept sticking his thumbs up and saying “luvvly jubbly”. Imagine David Jason 30kg lighter, with dreadlocks and Keith Richards' wrinkles, and you’re half-way there. The facial resemblance was so strong that for the first year, Cambodian kids would run past the bar and shout ‘luvvly jubbly’ at him, much to his annoyance. Then he slowly joined in, and the catchphrase stuck from there.

“Everyone’s talking about the kebabs, you know!” he said. “The boxer phoned up earlier asking about them. He’s having one, and I’ve got another three orders from the Finnish boys.” He rubbed his hands together again. “Luvvly jubbly!”

I chopped the chicken into thin strips lengthways and marinated them in oil, garlic, paprika, salt and pepper. Then I finely shredded the cabbage and sliced the tomatoes, onions, and cucumber. I mixed the salad together and stored it in a bowl in the fridge. Then I made the sauces. For the hot chilli sauce, I finely minced red chillies and mixed in ketchup, lemon juice, and spices. For the garlic, mint yoghurt sauce, I finely chopped fresh mint, garlic and cucumber and added two tubs of yoghurt and plenty of salt and pepper and lime juice.

Then I tried a prototype. I got the largest frying pan smoking over the hob, dripped in some oil and there was an explosion of flames as I threw in a handful of chicken. After three minutes I let the chicken rest as I heated the smaller frying pan and toasted the tortilla wraps until they were puffy and slightly scorched.

I lay the tortilla on a tray, put chicken in the middle, spooned over the yoghurt and chilli sauces, and topped it with salad (above). Then I made a half-moon shape with the bread and folded both sides inwards and folded up the kebab. I rolled it in a piece of foil like a Cornetto. A Babnetto if you will.

Rodney came back a few minutes later, saying he couldn’t find his other sandwich board to advertise the kebabs on. He said he’d write out a sign on a piece of paper and stick that over his existing board.

“How do you spell chicken?” he said.

I told him I’d write out the sign.

What A Squeak! The Tale Of Malty Mouse

This story about a man getting the shock of his life by finding a mouse splayed across the top of his malt loaf has brought back some unhappy memories.

He bought the Hyndman's malt loaf from a supermarket in the Ballymoney area of Northern Ireland for Christmas two years ago. But God knows what he’d done to upset Santa that year.

One can only imagine the moment he unwrapped the delicious loaf to discover the lifeless mammal embedded in the base of the bread, like Ida, the celebrated ‘missing link’ fossil unveiled in New York last month.

North Antrim Magistrates Court heard that the bread tins were filled with dough every night, and the mouse got in sometime between the tins being sprayed with oil and being filled with dough.

A judge was shown pictures of the incriminating rodent-in-the-loaf and fined D Hyndman and Son Ltd £1,000 plus costs for placing unsafe food on the market.

A defence lawyer suggested the mouse might have been put in the tin to "sabotage" the baker who has been in business for 60 years and has never had any complaints.

The hapless customer is now said to be pursuing a civil case against the firm.

Poor buggers. Mice get everywhere. Doesn’t matter how many traps you set.

Reminds me of the time I was living in a shared house on the Old Kent Road with about 300 Kiwis (don’t feed them water) when I popped some bread in the toaster and saw a small flash from the corner of my eye.

I thought nothing of it, of course, and began buttering my toast furiously, ready for a liberal application of Marmite when I spotted some blue furry mould on the bread.

Perfectly alright I thought, as Sir Julian Bashford would say. Besides I was hungry and those pesky Kiwis had nicked the rest of my bread.

Trouble was it didn’t look like normal mould. It just seemed to be attached to one side of the slice.

I took a couple of bites and then looked down into the bottom of the toaster and saw the electrified mouse. Haven’t eaten toast to this day. Or malt loaf for that matter.

Ramsay's Roasting Over 'Lesbian Pig' Slur

I’ve got a bad feeling about Gordon Ramsay – is the man finally losing the plot? Are his antics Down Under now one step too far?

Has Ramsay – the man who could once do no wrong, the man who could get away with shouting at Edwina Currie that it wasn’t enough for her to fuck the Prime Minister, she had to fuck Ramsay (up the ass) too – finally bitten off more than even he can chew?

He is already on the back foot following allegations about a long-term affair, claims about exaggerating his football career, the ready-meals debacle, the crumbling business empire, and getting kicked out of the list of the world’s top 100 restaurants.

So even for a chef with the size of his balls and ego, it may have seemed a little foolish – not to say a trifle churlish and downright misogynistic – to start calling Australian TV presenter Tracy Grimshaw a pig-faced lesbian.

The row has rumbled on since the weekend, with growing calls for Ramsay to be shipped out of the country in a convict ship, and Australian women’s groups calling for his bollocks to be hung like corks from Germaine Greer’s hat.

And now the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has waded in, describing Ramsay as "a new form of low life" and declaring war on Scotland.

The spat began at a food and wine show in Melbourne when Ramsay shocked the 3,000-strong audience by calling Grimshaw "a lesbian" and showing a photo of a nude woman on all fours, with multiple breasts and a pig's face.

"That's Grimshaw," he leered at the crowd like a bully in a tuck shop. "Holy crap. She needs to see a Botox doctor."

Grimshaw then retaliated on her show on Australia's Nine Network by calling the celebrity cook an "arrogant narcissist" and a "bully".

"I'm not going to pretend that his comments didn't hurt. I was absolutely miserable when I found out," she whined.

"He says it was a joke - well not to me or to anyone who truly cares about me.

"Truly, I wonder how many people would laugh if they were effectively described as 'an old ugly pig'. How is that funny, exactly?"

Grimshaw added: "Obviously Gordon thinks that any woman who doesn't find him attractive must be gay. For the record, I don't and I'm not."

She continued her attack in a radio interview, saying his insults upset her and her mother.

She said she did not expect an apology from the TV chef, adding: "I don't want one, I don't care.

"There's nothing more he can do to me now and he can't make it better."

But then Ramsay could not help himself and had another crack at Grimshaw, telling the crowd at the Good Food & Wine Show that he and the TV host had been long-time lovers.

"We were secret lovers for 20 years," he said before dismissing it as a joke. "No, I didn't go there...I didn't stoop that low, for God's sake."

Despite the storm, Ramsay remains unrepentant, saying his comments have been "blown out of context".

Bit like his football career? At least he didn’t mention the cricket.

Masterchef: 'I’ll Stick My Face In It'

“So, Lennie, tell me about your passion for cooking...” the researcher from the Masterchef show began.

She asked me pretty much the same questions I’d filled in on the application form. I tried to remember what I’d written. The more I listened to her gushing about the programme, the more I realised it was all a con. From her voice, she genuinely seemed to think Masterchef was offering people a chance to, as both Egg and Toad liked to say, “embark on an absolute, life-changing journey”.

There were no details about the prize cooking job, of course, just lots about what sort of contestants they were looking for. She wanted to know whether I’d worked full-time as a professional chef before, if I had received an NVQ catering qualification or similar in the past ten years, and whether I had the required level of enthusiasm, drive, love of food, and desire, to change my life.

At one point, she asked if I had ever been convicted of a “serious crime”. I kept quiet about that. If it came out later, I’d bring up Egg’s conviction for football hooliganism.

I began drifting off, listening to the spiel. She had the same irritating, husky, mee-jar voice as the show’s narrator...

“After 15 years in prison, Lennie is desperate for a life in food. In his heat, he blew the judges away with his chicken vindaloo."

“I’ll quite happily stick my face in it,” says Egg.

“But sometimes he gives himself too much to do, and more often than not, it tastes better than it looks...”

The bitch, I thought.

Then I wondered whether I’d said the word out loud. But the researcher was still talking.

“So the next stage is a casting day,” she gushed. “You may get invited along for that. But we’ll be interviewing about 8,000 people across the country and only choose 100 for the show...”

I had a one in 80 chance. I needed to get a job.

I went for a walk, and passed a catering agency advertising cooking jobs for £6 an hour. They didn’t ask whether I had any experience. Once I’d filled out a few forms, a short, fat, cocky man with a goatee (think Ricky Gervais locked in a Frey Bentos factory for two weeks), threw a few questions at me. The interview was over in seconds.

“How do you make a béchamel sauce?”

“First you infuse the milk…”

“Infuse?”

“Yeah, boil the milk with bay leaves, peppercorns, and you can use an onion…”

He waved me on irritably.

“Then melt some butter in a pan, stir in some flour to make a roux…then slowly whisk in…”

“Yeah, yeah fine.”

All he wanted to know was whether I knew how to make a fucking lasagne.

He phoned the next morning, but I was in bed. By the time I phoned back, the job was gone. But I didn’t want to work as a dinner lady anyway.

A week later I got an email from Masterchef, saying they were “very impressed by my application” and invited me for a casting day at the Brunei Gallery in London. It said:

“Please bring along a sample of your cooking for our judges to taste. You only need to bring one dish. The team will be tasting lots of food so it does not need to be a big portion. It can be sweet or savoury and must be cold or something that can be eaten/tasted cold. We will take into account that the food is cold and has had to travel. Please note there are NO REHEATING FACILITIES and there will be minimal preparation time/facilities but you will have to plate and serve your dish.

“The auditions will be filmed for broadcast so we want you looking and feeling your best. Please avoid wearing white or cream, any logos and steer clear of thin stripes, small spots or geometric patterns. Remember we want your personality to shine through so make sure you feel happy and comfortable as possible….

“Due to the large number of applicants we will be unable to contact unsuccessful applicants.”

I sat there thinking about what dish to go for, and whether I had any clean shirts, let alone any that weren’t striped.

It’d have to be something that could sit happily in a humid Tube carriage half-way across London. Looking back on it now, I still don’t know why I went for sushi.

Masterchef: From Office Into The Pan

I sat there looking at the questions on the Masterchef application form. I had no idea what to put down. The whole show was a farce. The prize was a job as a trainee chef at a top London restaurant. They didn’t say how much you’d get, or what the hours were, or what to do when you’re thrown out on the street because you can’t pay the rent. I couldn’t see Wallace buying the Big Issue off me when he stepped out of his Bentley. And Torode looked like he wouldn’t give a fly to a blind spider.

Maybe the prize didn’t exist at all. I mean, who the hell would take them up on it? The whole thing was about getting on the telly, and society’s mushrooming obsession with fame. I couldn’t see any of the contestants swapping their cushy day jobs for 16 hours slaving in an underground furnace on a wage just enough to keep them alive. Not if there weren’t any cameras about. They weren’t as mad as me. Nowhere near.

The recent winners and finalists seemed to be too busy churning out recipe books to spend much time learning the trade. A few had apparently done a stint here and there in a top kitchen, and Thomasina Myers had set up her own restaurant. But how long she spent there given all the book deals and TV appearances was anyone’s guess.

All I knew was that even if I did get in the finals, it was unlikely to lead to any proper paid cooking work - one winner had turned up at Le Gavroche to find it was unpaid. I needed professional training and a way to support myself if I was to do it properly - to open my restaurant by the sea.

There was also the time delay. I’d have to get myself a cooking job in the mean time. The programme was likely to be months away, and I was dying to get back in the kitchen. One hopeful had to wait eight months before the producers contacted him, then spent 40 minutes on the phone whispering about why he wanted to be a chef with his boss earwigging in the background.

What the hell. I filled in the form anyway...

:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow. You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...