Karen Barnaby: Salad rolls made special with rice paper

In 1982, I ate my first salad roll at one of the older, established Vietnamese restaurants on Spadina Avenue in Toronto, right before my first bowl of pho.
The salad rolls and pho were prepared by a tall, elegant and stern woman from an open kitchen in the middle of the restaurant. The rolls were filled with leaf lettuce, rice noodles, cilantro, mint, green onions, cucumber and pork skin that had been seasoned with fish sauce and toasted rice powder.
Basic, subtle and texturally perfect, the ing