Hu Tieu Nam Vang

One morning, at the old market in the middle of Nam Vang.

In the market, food stalls stand in the open air. Cambodians, well-off and ordinary alike, sit down side by side. Many of them order a bowl of hot noodle soup.

The soup here is very plain. The seller ladles broth made from pork bones over white rice noodles. On top, the seller usually adds only a pinch of minced pork and a few round fish balls. Then come a sprinkle of fried shallots and green scallions, and a handful of bean sprouts.

This city is the capital of Cambodia, and Vietnamese people call it Nam Vang. A noodle dish called hủ tiếu Nam Vang carries the very name of that city. Some people even look for the dish's distant roots in this simple bowl at the old market.

In the 19th century and into the early 20th, Chinese people of Teochew origin came from Guangdong province to live in Cambodia. They brought a noodle soup made with pork-bone broth and rice noodles.

That same morning, at a craft village in Mỹ Tho, in the Mekong Delta.

The workshop has been busy since early morning. One after another, large sheets of rice noodle come out of the steaming machine, pure white and still piping hot. A worker spreads each hot sheet flat on a bamboo rack and carries it out to the yard. There the racks stand in long rows under the sun. Wherever the sun reaches, the sheets slowly dry.

The rice for these sheets was put to soak the day before, for a full day and night, until every grain swelled soft. Hủ tiếu Mỹ Tho is made from fragrant rice grown in this very region. One variety is Gò Cát. Others are Nàng Hương and Nàng Út. Gò Cát rice is growing scarce, so the makers now use other varieties too.

The soaked rice is ground into flour. The flour rests in a tank and slowly settles to the bottom. The workers pour off the clear water on top and keep the milky white flour below. That flour goes into the steaming machine and in moments cooks into large sheets, just like the one spread out in the yard.

In the old days, every step was done by hand, from first to last. Today, machines do many of them.

At this hour, back at the old market in Nam Vang, the seller is still ladling pork-bone broth over bowls of noodles for customers.

Chinese people of Teochew origin pronounce the word hủ tiếu as củi tiếu. As for when hủ tiếu reached the Mekong Delta, and who brought it, each person tells it differently.

Some say hủ tiếu was first a dish of Teochew and Hokkien people. In this telling, it came to Mỹ Tho with a group of Chinese people in the second half of the 17th century. Then it spread across the Mekong Delta, and over time it stopped belonging to the Chinese alone.

Others tell how hủ tiếu Nam Vang traveled from the city of Nam Vang to southern Vietnam. Some say that was more than a hundred years ago. Others say it came much later.

The elders of Mỹ Tho remember their own hủ tiếu appearing in the early 1960s. In those days, noodle carts and stalls sprang up along the road from Mỹ Tho to Gò Công. Most stall owners were Vietnamese of Chinese descent, and the noodle workshops of that time had Vietnamese owners.

Back in the workshop yard, the sheets have had enough sun after about an hour. On bad-weather days, they are dried by machine. Once dry enough, each sheet is peeled off its rack. The sheets are dry but still supple, and a cutting machine slices them into fine strands. Then the noodles are packed.

Gò Cát rice makes noodles that are supple, translucent and sweet, with no sour taste. The noodles of Mỹ Tho smell of rice. Dipped briefly in boiling water, they turn soft without falling apart, and keep their chew. But they have one quirk. They must be eaten on the day they are made. So they are hard to send far.

Some people like their hủ tiếu in soup, with noodles and broth together in one bowl. Others like it dry, the noodles tossed in a sauce and a bowl of broth on the side.

Across the Mekong Delta, each area makes its noodles and cooks its hủ tiếu in its own way. In Sa Đéc, beside the Ngã Bát canal, there is a village that makes rice flour. The canal water here is fresh all year round, with no alum in it. Since their grandparents' time, the villagers have believed their flour owes its quality to that water.

A longtime flour maker still remembers the old ways. In the past, the flour had to be ground fine in a stone mill. Some people even pounded hibiscus leaves and stirred them into the water, to make the flour whiter and smoother.

Even a fourth-generation flour maker in the village does not know who founded the craft, or when it began. Since 2021, the village has held a yearly memorial for the founder, whose face no one has ever seen. It falls on the 20th day of the last month of the lunar year.

This rice flour becomes phở noodles, hủ tiếu noodles, shrimp crackers and much more. The hủ tiếu noodles made in Sa Đéc are flat and square, soft and smooth to eat.

Beside the Cần Thơ River is the noodle village of Cái Răng. The craft here dates from about the early 20th century and began with just a few households. The villagers mix rice flour with tapioca starch to make the noodles chewier. In the past, the whole village made hủ tiếu to sell to the trading boats at the Cái Răng floating market. The noodles went aboard and traveled with the boats all over the waterways of the Mekong Delta.

That afternoon in Mỹ Tho, the batch of noodles dried in the morning sun has reached a hủ tiếu stall, in time to be eaten the same day. The cook dips the noodles in a pot of boiling water, settles them in a bowl, then ladles on the broth. The broth is simmered from pork bones, ribs, dried shrimp and grilled squid. Every stall has its own way of making it. The broth is crystal clear. As it is poured, the smell of dried shrimp, grilled squid and fried onion rises from the bowl. A customer lifts a bite of noodles with chopsticks. They are soft without falling apart, and still chewy. Beside the bowl sits a plate of raw bean sprouts, garlic chives, lettuce and a few wedges of lime.

That same afternoon, at a hủ tiếu Nam Vang stall in southern Vietnam, a customer has just ordered a bowl. This bowl comes with a few quail eggs and a little pork offal. Golden, crispy fried garlic is scattered on top, and its smell fills the air.

Then, right in the middle of the bowl, the seller drops a pinch of minced pork, just like at the old market in Nam Vang that morning.