Hanoi Pho

For more than 100 years, no one has been able to say for certain where the word phở began, or where the first bowl was cooked.

Everyone knows phở, a bowl of noodles in hot broth, yet it has no birth certificate. No one wrote down the day it was born. The only way to find out is to follow the clues, one by one.

The first clue is a strange one: a word missing from the very place it should be.

To learn when a word first appeared, people open a dictionary. One dictionary dates from 1895, another from three years later. Neither has the word phở. In 1907, a French scholar wrote a study listing a great many foods and drinks of northern Vietnam. The study does not give phở a single line. Still, silence in the books does not necessarily mean the dish did not exist yet.

Then phở appears all at once, not on a page but in a picture.

Around 1908 or 1909, a Frenchman named Henri Oger had a picture book made about Vietnamese trades. In it, a phở seller walks through narrow lanes with a carrying pole on one shoulder, half of the stall hanging from each end. Customers squat right beside the load to eat.

Only a year or two after the 1907 study, phở was in a picture. By then it was already riding on sellers' shoulders all over Hanoi.

But the bowl on that pole began somewhere. Here the search for its roots splits into three paths.

The first path leads to the banks of the Red River. Some say that at the ferry landings and river flats, people sold porters a dish called bún xáo trâu. It was broth simmered from buffalo bones, poured hot over noodles. The sellers replaced the noodles with bánh cuốn cut into strands. Then they replaced the buffalo meat with beef. Beef was cheaper because the French raised many cattle at Ba Vì. Later, the bánh cuốn of Thanh Trì was made thicker. It became almost like phở noodles. One family on Hàng Ngang Street recorded this in its family history. But that is only one family's account.

The second path leads to the French kitchen and its pot-au-feu: beef and beef bones stewed for a very long time. Some think phở grew out of that way of cooking. Believers point to the name: the French word feu means fire, and it sounds almost like "phơ." Doubters point inside the pot: pot-au-feu has carrots and turnips, and phở has neither.

The third path begins with a street cry. Cantonese people living in Hanoi had a dish called ngưu nhục phấn: beef and noodles with a sauce cooked from the meat poured over them. People say that street sellers walked the town calling out "phấn ơ." Called and heard again and again, the story goes, the cry slowly became "phở." But others note that ngưu nhục phấn is cooked differently from phở and leans toward the flavors of Chinese medicinal herbs.

A riverbank, a word for fire, a street cry: three clues, and none of them settles the question.

Downriver, toward the sea, lies Nam Định, now part of Ninh Binh province. A fourth view points there. Some researchers believe the dish began in Nam Định, as phở noodles in bone broth sold to textile workers. Three villages are known as the homeland of Nam Định phở. Two of them are Vân Cù and Giao Cù. The third is Tây Lạc. But this view, too, has not explained why the dish is called phở.

The written record begins to speak, louder each time.

In 1933, a dictionary gave a clear explanation of the word phở. It even listed phở chín and phở tái, the well-done and the rare. The dictionary was compiled by the French School of the Far East, a French institute that studies the classical civilizations of Asia. The missing word now had its place in a dictionary.

Four years later, the poet Tú Mỡ wrote a whole poem in praise of phở, naming each thing in the bowl.

In 1943, the writer Thạch Lam published a book called Hanoi's 36 Streets. He called phở "a special treat of Hanoi." Other places had it too, he added, but in his view only in Hanoi was it truly good. People ate it all day long, he wrote: morning, noon and night.

He described a good phở stall. The broth was clear and sweet. The noodles were tender but did not fall apart. The beef, marbled with fat, was crisp, not tough. The pot bubbled hard, and its smell drifted down a whole stretch of street.

One bowl he praised without reserve. Its broth was always scalding, sending up clouds of steam, with fresh herbs, pepper and a sharp drop of lime. And there was a faint scent of cà cuống, a giant water bug. Thạch Lam described that scent as "drifting lightly, like a doubt." So even in the bowl he praised so highly, a little doubt drifted, like the question that keeps following the name phở.

The same book holds one more small question. Thạch Lam wrote that some people thought change meant progress, so they turned to making chicken phở. But it seemed the change was not welcomed. He himself stayed loyal to classic phở. Likewise, he liked the old way of singing tuồng and chèo, two traditional forms of Vietnamese theater. As for when chicken phở first appeared, the accounts all differ. Only one thing is certain: by the time Thạch Lam wrote his book, chicken phở was already there.

Little by little, phở changed, a bit at each stall. Yet some things have been kept for a very long time. In the old days, the broth simmered over a wood fire. Once the pot of bones boiled, the fire had to be kept going, and the owner stayed awake all night tending every flame. Beef bones and beef simmered for a very long time, and the broth was fragrant with cinnamon and star anise. The noodles were of medium width, not too thick, so they stayed soft. On top went scallions, cilantro and onion. Parents passed this way of cooking down to their children, through days of standing at the stove together.

The people of Hanoi call phở a morning treat, because it is eaten most in the morning. The night belongs to the cook, the early morning to those who eat.

On August 9, 2024, the folk knowledge of Hanoi phở was added to Vietnam's national list of intangible cultural heritage. It is the know-how of cooking phở, handed down through many generations.

On the same day, the folk knowledge of Nam Định phở joined the list too. Two places once named in the search for the roots of phở now have their names written side by side.

A heritage is something the whole country recognizes as its own. Its keepers are the cooks, the families who practice the craft, and the people who sit down to eat.

The historian Dương Trung Quốc offers a view that brings the paths together. He sees phở as the meeting place of three kitchens. The French kitchen brought stewed beef. The East Asian kitchen brought foods made from rice. The Southeast Asian kitchen brought its way of using fish sauce.

So the question still stands. The answer may lie with the riverbank, the word for fire or the street cry, in Hanoi or in Nam Định. To this day, no one can say for certain.

When a hot bowl of phở is set down in front of you, look closely: those three kitchens are still meeting, right there in the bowl.

The bowl itself does not need to answer. It just stays hot and fragrant, waiting for someone to sit down, like the customers who squatted beside a phở seller's carrying pole more than 100 years ago.