Hanoi Bun Thang

A bamboo ladder leans against a whitewashed wall in a corner of the front room.

On a wooden cabinet sits a packet of herbal medicine, wrapped in paper and tied with thin string, waiting to be brewed. In the kitchen, a pot of broth rests on the stove over a low flame.

The three things are nothing alike. The ladder is for climbing up to the loft. The packet is for brewing into a cup of medicine. The pot is for cooking. Yet in Vietnamese, all three answer to one word: thang.

The pot in the kitchen is waiting to become bowls of bún thang, in an old Hanoi house, in the last days of Tết, the Lunar New Year.

After days of boiled chicken and bánh chưng rice cakes, the household is starting to tire of them. That is just when many people in Hanoi turn to bún thang, after the second day of Tết.

No one knows for sure when the dish was born. Folk accounts say Hanoi women cooked bún thang after Tết from whatever was left on the feast trays: a little chicken, a little pork roll, a few eggs. One homemaker tells it another way. Her mother saw bún thang as the rite that closed Tết. She began preparing it in the last days of the lunar year and chose a chicken just for it. Still others say bún thang was once a dish of the royal palace and the mansions of the lords.

In the old days, families held a rite to see the ancestors off after their days home for Tết. That rite is called hóa vàng, and its feast tray held bún thang and a dish of shrimp rolls. People in old Hanoi called bún thang served with the rolls cỗ thang cuốn.

In one old Hanoi household, on feast days, the older women carried the little stove out to the courtyard in the middle of the house. It was bright there, handy for reheating the broth for the bún thang. When the feast was nearly done, an aunt or uncle brought out the bún thang, six small bowls to a tray. Everyone sat cross-legged around the food, gathered in a circle.

Since early morning, the grandmother has had chicken bones, pork bones and a few dried prawns in the pot. Then she adds a little sá sùng, sea worms dried in the sun and brought in from the coast. A few households also grill a dried squid and drop it in. She grills ginger and dried shallots until fragrant before they go in.

The flame stays low. The lid stays off. Every so often foam rises, and she lifts it off with a ladle, hour after hour. The skimming is the painstaking part. She must watch the whole time, so the broth stays clear and lightly sweet.

Those who know the kitchen say the hardest job is making the egg sheets. While the broth simmers, the grandmother turns to the eggs. She cracks them into a bowl and beats them with a little clear liquor and a little salt. She adds a little water and strains it smooth. When the pan is hot, she wipes the inside with the thinnest film of fat. Then she pours in a small ladle of egg and tilts the pan so it spreads out, round and thin. In a flash, she flips the sheet over. Paper-thin golden sheets leave the pan, one after another.

Long ago, a mother-in-law would often test a daughter-in-law's skill with a plate of egg cut into threads. Neat threads, thin and even, showed at a glance how deft the cook was.

She stacks the egg sheets, rolls them up and slices them very thin. The strands come out as fine as silkworm thread.

Next comes the chicken. She boils it until just cooked, then tears the breast into shreds as thin as white thread. The rest of the meat she slices as fine as rice noodles. Then she cuts the giò lụa pork roll into thin strips too. Chicken, egg or pork roll, everything is cut to about the width of a noodle.

In those days, a Hanoi boy kept wondering why his grandmother sliced the pork roll so thin, instead of cutting it into eight pieces as at a wedding feast. When he grew up, he thought perhaps he had found the answer himself.

She toasts dried shrimp until fragrant, then pounds them in a mortar. She pounds and pounds until the shrimp fall apart into floss, fluffy and light as cotton. She soaks a few dried radishes until they swell, then pickles them sweet and sour. She chops the handful of rau răm herbs very fine.

In the kitchen, the broth she has skimmed all morning is called nước thang. The pinch of floss she has just pounded is a thang of shrimp floss. Pouring broth into a bowl is called chan thang, and the bowl of noodles is a bát thang. Each thing laid in the bowl is a thang as well. One small bowl holds so many thang, each in a corner of its own.

Some explain that thang is a Chinese character meaning hot water, or soup. Read that way, bún thang is simply rice noodles with soup poured over them.

Others say the thang here is a thang of medicine, the brewed cup from a doctor of traditional Eastern medicine. One such dose gathers many ingredients, a little of each. By that reading, the bowl is like a dose of medicine too, gathering many things, a little of each.

Another account says the name was borrowed from a different dish. Perhaps it was canh thượng thang, an elaborate soup of old Hanoi. Or Đán hoa thang, a dish from the royal palace.

Which thang gave the dish its name is still debated today.

The grandmother puts no spring onion, cilantro or shiitake mushrooms in the bowl. No lime or chili sauce either, so the broth keeps all its fragrance.

Her bowls are small, only a little bigger than a rice bowl. At the bottom she lays a few noodles. On top, she sets each thing neatly in its own corner. For the very center, every family has its own idea. One house places a pinch of green rau răm. Another sprinkles shrimp floss. Some set down a round slice of salted egg, like a sun.

To one side she sets out mắm tôm shrimp paste, pickled radish, cà cuống and fresh chili. Those are for the grown-ups, who help themselves to whatever they like. The old bún thang had a strong scent that came from an essence of cà cuống, a giant water bug. Today that essence is hard to find.

In the house at the end of Tết, it is time for the bowls to join the feast tray for hóa vàng. She ladles up boiling broth and pours it in a ring around the inside of the bowl. Then she holds the ladle across the rim and drains that broth away.

The second ladleful she pours in and leaves in the bowl. The clear nước thang slips into every little corner, and each corner cradles a thang of its own.