What the Pho?!

A few months ago I went to Vietnam for the first time. I came back with a problem. I now think about soup at inappropriate hours.

The one time before

I had eaten pho exactly once in my life before that trip.

Frankfurt. With a guy from the US I knew through table tennis. He was over in Germany for a stretch and he picked the place. I remember liking it a lot.

Then I forgot it existed.

That sounds worse than it was. Nothing personal against the soup. It just slid off my radar, the way a good song you hear once at a party does. You would recognise it instantly. You will never think of it again on your own.

Vietnam put it back

The food over there is unreasonable across the board.

Bánh mì that makes every other sandwich look like it isn't trying. Bún chả, which is grilled pork dropped into a bowl of sweet and sour broth, and which I would eat every single day until a doctor stopped me. Things on grills I could not name and ordered by pointing.

Pho still won. It wasn't close.

It barely has any ingredients

The part that surprised me is how simple it is.

Rice noodles. Broth. A bit of meat. Herbs thrown on top. A wedge of lime you squeeze in yourself.

That's the whole bowl.

There is no sauce hiding anything. No twelve components elbowing each other. If the broth is good, the bowl is good. If the broth is bad, nothing on earth saves it. I like food that can't lie to me.

All the work sits in that broth. Bones simmering for hours. Onion and ginger charred black before they go in, which is the step everybody skips at home and then wonders why theirs tastes like warm water. Star anise, cinnamon, a few cloves, a splash of fish sauce.

That's it. That's the trick. Hours of patience and a blackened onion.

The history is better than the food deserves

I went looking into where it comes from, expecting something ancient. It isn't ancient at all.

Pho is barely a hundred years old. It shows up in northern Vietnam in the early 1900s, somewhere between Hanoi and the mill town of Nam Định. Before the French arrived, Vietnamese cattle mostly pulled ploughs. Almost nobody was eating beef. Then the colonists turned up wanting steak, which left an awful lot of bones lying around. Somebody looked at the bones and made stock out of them.

Even the name might be secondhand. One theory traces it to pot-au-feu, the French beef stew. Another points at Chinese words for rice noodles. Nobody has settled the argument. So the most Vietnamese dish on the planet may be named after a French pot and built on Chinese noodles, which is a pretty good summary of how food actually works.

Then came 1954. The country was split in two and roughly a million people moved from north to south. They took pho with them. The south got hold of it and immediately started adding things. Bean sprouts. A whole fistful of herbs. Hoisin and chilli sauce on the side. Plenty of northerners still consider this vandalism.

My favourite part comes after the war. The north was broke and rationed, meat was scarce, and canteens served pho with the noodles and the broth and no beef in it whatsoever. People started calling it phở không người lái. Pho without a pilot. A joke about the unmanned American aircraft that used to come over.

A country that hungry, still making jokes about its own empty soup. I think about that every time I get annoyed that a delivery is twelve minutes late.

The embarrassing bit

Which brings me to my local Vietnamese place.

I have been going there for years. The owner knows my order before I open my mouth. Good guy, excellent food, zero complaints.

I got home from Vietnam, walked in, and for the first time ever actually read the menu.

Pho. Right there. Near the top. It had been sitting on that menu the entire time.

For years I had walked straight past it and ordered rice with meat and vegetables and sauce, because that is what you order at the Asian place. That is the script. I had been standing next to the good thing and staring in the other direction.

I order the pho now. It's excellent. He seemed pleased and a little amused, which is completely fair.

So: go to Vietnam. Or don't, and just read your local menu properly for once. Honestly, both work.