1 hour ago, Recoil Rob said:Not a reference to bahn mi, more a comparison of how when I learned to cook I was browning the onions. About 15 years ago I learned I was caramelizing the onions. Now I subject the onions to the Maillard reaction....
Gotcha. I'd say that your changing use of 3 different words (browning, caramelizing and undergoing the Maillard reaction) to describe the same process is different from the evolution of the Vietnamese term for wheat bread to include both the original usage and entire sandwiches made from that bread. So the name of a part (bread) is now also used to define the whole (sandwich). That evolution happened within the Vietnamese language but only the second usage made the transition into English as a synonym for Vietnamese sandwich.
And like many adopted foods, we manage to slap the name on all manner of variations (like duck confit 
)that stray rather far afield from the earliest iteration.
