Bánh Mì Chay Rằm

Twice a month a certain kind of cart in Ho Chi Minh City stops selling pork. The dates are mùng một and rằm, the first and the fifteenth of the lunar month, when Vietnamese Mahayana practice asks for a meat-free day, and a sandwich sold into that window is what this entry covers. Worth saying plainly at the outset: bánh mì chay rằm is not a name you will see chalked on a board in Saigon. Vietnamese writing uses the phrase descriptively, a vegetarian bánh mì for the full-moon day, and the sandwich underneath is an ordinary bánh mì chay that happens to be sold on a date that matters.

The calendar is the only thing holding the category together, and it is a real one. Two days is the baseline observance, nhị trai, and the ladder runs upward from there to six days and ten for stricter practice. Around one Vietnamese person in ten eats vegetarian at all, and among those who do the dominant pattern is periodic rather than permanent, which is why a chay kitchen can sit half empty on a Wednesday and fill every table when the date comes round. Vietnamese reporting puts the lift at fifteen to twenty percent in vegetarian sales around those days, and one Tân Bình bánh mì shop simply charges more, 20,000₫ on an ordinary morning and 25,000₫ on the two.

What arrives in the bread on those days is rarely the tofu an outsider expects. A survey of about twenty vegetarian bánh mì shops by Vietnamese national press found the common fillings were chả chay, the vegetarian sausage, and pâté chay, with named tofu appearing on only five menus and mostly at the expensive end. The pâté is the more interesting of the two: canned versions from Vietnamese manufacturers list soy and wheat protein on the panel rather than the mushroom that foreign writing assumes, and one cart makes its own from taro, breadcrumbs and onion.

That onion is worth pausing on, because it marks the line between the temple and the street. Strict Mahayana practice excludes the five pungent alliums, garlic and onion among them, and a monastery kitchen cooks without any of them. Street chay does not, and the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha's own newspaper has told lay readers that those who can avoid the five pungent ingredients should, and those who cannot, for reasons of family cooking or eating out, may still practise validly. The cart in Tân Bình putting onion in its pâté is inside the rule, not bending it.

The cooking problem is the one any meatless bánh mì faces, sharpened by the fact that nobody is trying very hard to hide it. Pâté, mayonnaise and butter all leave together under chay rules, since the practice excludes eggs and often dairy, and those three are the fat that keeps the bread from eating dry. What goes back in is soy, fermented bean or mushroom for savour, and a heavier hand with the đồ chua than a pork roll would take. Get it wrong and the result is a wet, underseasoned roll that reads as an obligation rather than lunch.

The practice reaches past the two days. The seventh lunar month brings Vu Lan, when many families eat chay for the whole month rather than the usual pair of dates, and vegetarian restaurants report two to three times their normal covers. The rhythm is also loosening at the edges, with operators saying customers now come steadily through the week rather than only on the calendar. A sandwich built for two days a month is increasingly ordered on the other twenty-eight.

A date rather than a recipe

The observance is old and the sandwich is not. Vegetarian practice in Vietnam predates the Common Era and flourished under the Lý and Trần dynasties. The bread is younger by centuries: bánh mì appears as a gloss for wheat bread in Jean-Louis Taberd's Latin-Vietnamese dictionary of 1838, two decades before the French took Saigon, and the filled version most often credited is the Hòa Mã stall of 1958 on Cao Thắng Street, run by a couple who had come south after the 1954 partition, the wife having worked for a Hanoi firm that supplied cold cuts to French restaurants. What joined bread to calendar was arithmetic. Once a city had carts selling filled loaves on every corner, two days a month when a large share of customers would not eat pork became a commercial fact those carts had to answer.

The two dates themselves come from the folk lunar calendar rather than from scripture. Vietnamese Buddhist sources cite sutras for the six-day and ten-day observances but not for the pairing of the first and the fifteenth, which maps onto the older sóc and vọng reckoning of new moon and full moon. The southern skew has a plausible mechanism too, since the syncretic religions that mandate vegetarian days, Cao Đài with its six-day then ten-day requirement and Hòa Hảo in the Mekong Delta, are both southern. At Long Hoa market in Tây Ninh, where most traders are Cao Đài, vegetarian food is simply the default rather than the exception.

Dedicated chay bánh mì sellers remain thin on the ground and cluster near pagodas, which is the clearest evidence that the trade follows the observance rather than the other way round. The southern weighting has a date behind it: Hòa Hảo, founded in An Giang in 1939 and prescribing vegetarian days on the sóc and vọng reckoning, put a large Mekong Delta population on exactly this calendar, and Cao Đài's Tân Luật asks its followers for six such days a month before raising the number to ten.