On the origins of phở

There is a question that any Hanoian over fifty will answer with the same shrug: who invented phở. The shrug is itself the answer.

The bowl that arrives at your table on Lý Quốc Sư Street — banh phở rice noodles soft as the inside of a cheek, a broth the colour of weak black tea, twenty paper-thin slices of beef arranged like fallen petals — is a peasant dish. It was assembled in the smoke kitchens of Nam Định province at the turn of the twentieth century from the leftovers nobody else wanted: bones the French butchers couldn't sell, scraps of fat, ginger and shallot charred over an open flame because there was no money for clean fuel.

Three things had to happen at once for the dish to exist. The French had to set up cattle ranching, which they did in the 1880s, leaving Vietnam with carcasses to dispose of. Migrant labourers had to need a single-bowl breakfast, which they did once the colonial economy began moving people from village to factory. And the rice-noodle stalls of the Red River Delta had to be willing to combine the two.

The first written reference

The earliest printed mention of phở appears in a 1907 essay in the Hanoi weekly paper Đăng Cổ Tùng Báo, where a writer (unnamed) describes the new street-corner stalls selling something he calls «xáo trâu phở» — a buffalo-noodle soup 1. The phở half of the compound seems to come from feu, the French word for fire, suggesting that the migrant Cantonese chefs running the early stalls were in conversation with the Frenchmen who ate at them. By 1925 the buffalo had been replaced with beef, the spice cabinet had absorbed star anise and cassia from Chợ Lớn, and the dish had quietly walked its way south to Saigon.

What's striking is that nobody at the time considered phở Vietnamese. It was understood as a specialty of Hanoi, a city dish, the kind of thing a country cousin would marvel at on a market visit. The nationalisation of phở — the moment it became «our soup» rather than «the Hanoi soup» — happened in stages: first when refugees fleeing the 1954 partition carried it south and met the southern palate's appetite for sweetness and herbs 2, and again after 1975, when the boats carrying the diaspora set up the first phở counters in Westminster, Houston and Paris.

What the broth does

A good Hanoi-style broth is not seasoned so much as conducted. The cook simmers beef knucklebones for six to eight hours with the charred ginger and shallot, plus a sachet of star anise, cinnamon, clove, cardamom and coriander seed in austere proportions: a pinch of each, never enough that any single spice declares itself. The result should taste like a memory of beef rather than the thing itself — a clear, slightly sweet, almost evaporated essence. Saigon-style broths cook longer, sweeter and cloudier, with rock sugar and a wider spice envelope, but the Hanoi school holds that anything you can identify by name has been overdone.

The same restraint governs the garnish. In Hanoi the bowl arrives plain, with quarters of lime, fresh chillies and perhaps a few sprigs of rau húng láng (a mint-basil endemic to the lakeside neighbourhood the herb is named after). The southern habit of piling beansprouts, sawtooth coriander, hoisin and sriracha onto the bowl is treated, in the north, as a kind of charming illiteracy.

Where it sits now

Phở has, over the last decade, become the kind of dish travel magazines describe in capital letters. There is now a phở at the Hôtel Métropole that costs more than a week's wages for the woman selling phở out of a ladle and a plastic chair four streets away. The street version, by every measure that matters, is better. This is generally true: in Asia, when the ingredients have been honest and the cook has been doing it for thirty years, the bowl has nowhere to hide.

The ladle-and-chair vendor near the Đồng Xuân market — she will be there from 6 a.m. until she runs out, which is around 9 — was taught the broth by her grandmother, who was taught by hers. There is a recipe in this collection that approximates her bowl, but it is exactly that: an approximation. The dish lives in the muscle memory of the people who make it daily, and what we can write down is only the scaffold.