The word xeo is onomatopoeia. It is the sound of cold batter hitting a very hot iron pan — an aggressive, emphatic sizzle that rises and then settles as the batter spreads and begins to set. Banh xeo literally means sizzling cake. The name is the sound it makes. I heard that sound every morning of the first seventeen years of my life, because my mother made and sold banh xeo from a stall in Cho Han market in Da Nang, and she woke at four o'clock in the morning to start the work before the breakfast crowd arrived.
Our family lived behind the market in two rooms. I shared a bed with my two younger sisters. The sound that woke me each morning was not an alarm but the sound of the pan — a heavy iron pan my mother had used since before I was born, black and seasoned and so heavy that only she could lift it comfortably. She would set it on the gas burner in the dark and wait until a drop of water flicked into it disappeared in an instant. Then the batter. Then the xeo. Then I knew what time it was.
She filled each crepe with small river prawns, slices of fatty pork belly, fresh bean sprouts, and spring onion. She folded them in half — a perfect half-moon, golden and crackling — and served them on banana leaves with a plate of fresh herbs and lettuce for wrapping, and small bowls of nuoc cham so sweet-sour it made your eyes water. Customers ate standing at a low table, tearing pieces with their fingers, wrapping them in the herbs, dipping, eating quickly because there was always someone behind them wanting the same thing.
I moved to Paris in 2005 for a PhD in materials science. I packed one medium suitcase. I packed, in that suitcase, my mother's cast-iron pan — carefully wrapped in my winter coat, positioned in the centre of the case like something fragile, which in a sense it was. The customs officer at Charles de Gaulle airport looked at the X-ray, looked at me, looked at the X-ray again, and decided not to ask. I have used that pan every Sunday morning in Paris for twenty years.
I made banh xeo for my French husband, Julien, on our third date, in my student apartment on Rue de la Roquette. He had never eaten Vietnamese food except in restaurants. He watched me make the batter the night before, watched me heat the pan the next morning until it smoked, watched the batter hit the iron and heard the sound. He said, 'Ca fait xeo.' He had understood immediately why the dish had its name. I knew then that things would be fine with us.
My mother retired from the stall two years ago. She is sixty-eight. When I visit Da Nang, she still wakes at four to make banh xeo for the family, out of habit or love or both — I think these are the same thing. I watch her at the stove the way I watched her as a child: the weight of the pan, the angle of the wrist, the exact moment she folds the crepe before it stiffens. In Paris, on Sunday mornings, when the batter hits the iron, I can hear what she would say: not too much oil, not too little heat, and do not rush the fold.
