Notable Sandwiches #101: Khao Jee Pâté
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the series where I drag my long-suffering editor David Swanson through the bizarro, shifting sands of Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, a Laotian dish: the khao jee pâté.
Between Lingaparvata Mountain and the Mekong River in Laos is one of the oldest temple complexes in the world, dating back thousands of years. Now in ruins, Vat Phou is a mix of megalithic sandstone structures from the second century BC and elaborate, carefully worked Khmer architecture built on the site in subsequent centuries. The stone itself, gray with time, rises as if the earth made itself a great thing yearning toward heaven, out of the river plain. In the worn steps within the temple complex, the balustrades are carved into naga serpents, and gods dance in intricate stonework. Great shrines lie under shrouds of moss.
Sixth-century Chinese travelers wrote that Vat Phou was a site of human sacrifice; archaeological analysis of the core megalithic structures declare them, based on the crocodiles and serpent carvings within, to have been a sacred place where tutelary spirits—guardians of places and peoples, rivers and nations—were worshiped with blood. Now there’s only that glory of stone, hushed and hot and haunted, rising from a lush profusion of green.
Between 1964 and 1973, American pilots flew 580,000 attack missions over Laos, an average of one payload of explosives every eight minutes for almost a decade. By the time the last US bombs fell in April 1973, more than two million tons of unexploded munitions had been left behind. Laos had never been a formal party in the U.S. war against Vietnam; its bombardment was cloaked in both clandestine violence and public apathy.
“Geographically, Laos is a small, landlocked nation, put away from the eyes of the world. It's poor, it's communist, it's intensely Buddhist: three things that don't exactly play well in America,” the Laotian-American chef James Syhabout writes in Hawker Fare: Stories & Recipes from a Refugee Chef's Isan Thai & Lao Roots. Over the last fifty years, twenty thousand people have died as a result of triggering unexploded ordnance in Laos. Many others have lost limbs, eyes, parents, siblings—and the ability to farm land whose primary crop might be bombs. Children are taught unexploded-ordnance safety in schools. It’s another kind of human sacrifice: at enormous scale, and without benefit of any tutelary deity to guide it. It makes the earth beneath your feet an enemy, seamed through with unseen death.
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Between the construction of Vat Phou and the onset of American air bombardment, the area we now call Laos was overrun by many empires. It once consisted of numerous scattered principalities; then it was a unified kingdom in 1353; then a prize fought over by Burma and Siam. It was a backwater province, it was a crucial bridge between imperial destinations, it was a place people lived, farmed, ate, died. In the late nineteenth century, it became a not-especially-distinguished part of the colonial venture that was French Indochina, a sweeping land grab that encompassed Cambodia, Laos, parts of China and Vietnam, and whose governmental strategy alternated between brutality and neglect.
Though the French brought the occasional famine to Indochina—particularly to Vietnam, in which two million people died of starvation before the dissolution of French Indochina in 1945—they also brought bread. Specifically, the baguette, introduced by the thousands of French colonists who occupied the country, but whose avarice was tempered by homesickness.
In many respects, the khao jee pâté sandwich resembles its more famous cousin, the banh mi: served on a light, crispy Lao baguette, it generally features pork-liver pâté, Lao sausage (chopped pork seasoned with lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, shallots, cilantro, chillies, garlic, salt, sticky rice, and fish sauce), papaya slices, cucumber, cilantro, and jeow bong, a local, pungent variant on sweet chili sauce. It’s both a humble street food, slung at roadside stalls, and—quite literally—the food of kings: recipes for sai oua, the Lao sausage used in the sandwich, were painstakingly recorded by the royal chef Chaleunsilp Phia Sing, a man responsible for the tutelage of princes and the stuffing of sausage alike.
But to consider the khao jee pâté and the banh mi interchangeable—despite their similarities and convergent origins—is a mistake. Lao food is, Syhabout contends, more pungent and less sweet than its Thai and Vietnamese counterparts, particularly the sugar-heavy versions of Thai dishes favored by American palates. “In Bangkok almost all service workers speak Lao, and the foods of Laos and Lao Isan are everywhere,” Syhabout writes. “So yeah, you could say laap, sticky rice, papaya salad, and gai yang have become Thai but they're Lao by birth, conceived deep in the Lan Xang Kingdom—Land of a Million Elephants—out of the Laotian landscape of river and jungle.” Bitterness is a sought-after flavor in Laotian cuisine, alongside heat and fermentation.
A chief exemplar is jeow bong, the chili sauce that tops a khao jee pâté, a dizzying medley of flavors, undiminished by the simplifying demands of mass-market American tastes. While Kikkoman’s mass-marketed Thai-style chili sauce boasts sugar (the first ingredient), water, xanthan gum, and modified corn starch in its twelve-ingredient bottle, jeow bong—in one recipe from Laos-born chef Lane Souvannalith—demands shredded pork or water buffalo skin, galangal, tamarind paste, palm sugar, shallots, fish sauce, and two types of dried chili. It demands a kind of attention, of the palate and mind. It is the food of a people who have learned how to taste bitterness, to tame it and make it their own.
None of which is to say that Lao food shouldn’t make a run, all its own, on global palates; a khao jee pâté stand on every corner sounds like a dream. But this is a country that has been overlooked almost as frequently as it has endured abuse and conquest, and its cuisine is no different. That doesn’t mean, in its riverine, lush landscape with its hidden treasures and hidden menaces, and in the food that sweeps down from the Luang Prabang Mountains and up from the banks of the Mekong, there is no glory. There is, and to find it, you just have to look, as in the mammoth temple complex of Vat Phou: in that great ruin of stone are old and secret serpents, and a profusion of gods with their mouths open–in laughter or in hunger, no one alive can now say.
Beautiful and so informative, thank you