Hanoi Food, from Pho to Green Rice

No one can say where the first bowl of phở was cooked. Start with that puzzle, then follow rice through the kitchens of Hanoi: steamed into sheets thin enough to see through, laid under a clear broth at the end of Tết, and pounded into jade-green cốm.

Four stories of Hanoi food and the people who make it: the unsolved origins of pho, the paper-thin rice rolls of Thanh Tri, the bun thang of the last days of Tet, and the young green rice of Vong village.