Banh mi: more than a sandwich
Kathy Nguyen holds up a banh mi sandwich she made at Banh Mi DC in Falls Church, Va., Oct. 16, 2009. The Vietnamese sandwiches have become a growing fad in the United States.
Banh mis have made it. Always delicious, these Vietnamese sandwiches are now officially among the prestigious grouping of English nouns.
Among the 900 new entries added to the Oxford English Dictionary this year, "banh mi" joins its fellow culinary delights taquitos (a crisp-fried Tex-Mex snack) and kleftiko (a Greek dish of slow-cooked lamb) in this honor.
"As the culinary appetites of the English-speaking world grow ever more diverse, loan words referring to new cuisines are a perennial source of new OED entries," the dictionary's official website said.
Banh mis are typically made on baguettes and involve thinly sliced pickled carrots and daikon (a kind of radish), cucumbers, cilantro, chili peppers, pate, mayonnaise and various kinds of meat.
Other new food-related OED entries include the bite-sized "doughnut hole" and the often handy "five-second rule," which "allows for the eating of a delicious morsel that has fallen to the floor, provided that it is retrieved within the specified period of time."
But you already knew that.