Phu Do Rice Noodle Village

Wash the rice until it is clean, and scrub it well. Grind the rice into flour. Draw the flour out into threads. Boil the threads and eat them in place of rice.

The old chronicle of Phú Đô village says those few short words came in a dream, in a hard year.

The people of Phú Đô still keep that chronicle in the village communal house. Beside it lie royal decrees granted by emperors long ago. In that old book, the village god has a long name that sounds very grand: Vĩ Mộc Đại Vương Trần Câu Mang.

The book says he came from An Đô, the old name of today's Phú Đô village. He was a gifted general long ago, in the time of Lý Nam Đế, an emperor who ruled in the 6th century. After he died, he was granted land for a place of worship, and the villagers worshipped him as their guardian spirit.

The story goes that in the year of Đinh Mùi, the year 1427, the village was hit by floods and went short of food. It was the time when the nation was being built by Lê Lợi, who founded the Lê dynasty. Then the god came to the villagers in a dream. He showed them how to use the rice that had soaked up water: wash it well, grind it into flour, draw it into threads, and boil them to eat. The threads boiled from that rice had a strange-sounding name, phấn miến. Thanks to this new food, the villagers and the soldiers made it through the hard year.

Today, past midnight, kitchen fires already glow red in the noodle-making homes of Phú Đô. Hundreds of households here make bún, noodles made from rice.

The village keeps another story too, about the elder Hồ Nguyên Thơ, from the land of Thanh. In that story, he started the craft of bún in the village more than 400 years ago. The village honors him as the founder of the craft. On festival days and ceremonial days, families carry trays of bún to the communal house as offerings to him.

Yet another telling takes the craft back to the days when the village was still called Kẻ Quách. It begins after the victory over the Ming, the dynasty then ruling China. A group of soldiers were rewarded, and they founded the hamlet of Kẻ Quách on empty mounds of land outside Thăng Long, the city now called Hanoi.

The early years in Kẻ Quách were very hard, and many families had to leave the village. Those who stayed tried every kind of work. They husked paddy and pounded rice to sell, and they made cakes. Then they peddled small goods in round baskets and flat trays. One day, an old man came back to the village after many years away, bringing the craft of making bún. The village has kept every one of these tellings. People say the hamlet of Kẻ Quách later took the name Hương Đô. Then it became Hồng Đô, and at last Phú Đô, the name it carries today.

As people still tell it, the first bundles of bún were quite unlike those of today. The noodles back then were brown and cloudy, only a little thicker than a toothpick. They were called bún đồng hến. People sold them by the bundle, each on a piece of banana leaf. In those days, most of the tools were of fired clay. The bran fed the pigs, and the husks fed the kitchen fire.

From bún đồng hến, the villagers went on to make bún cách. They made bún hình hoa as well. Bún cách, also called bún vảy ốc, has fine strands, shaped by hand into thin pieces. Bún hình hoa, noodles shaped like flowers, belonged to the weddings of the old days. Before the wedding, the groom's family carried a gift called lễ sêu to the bride's family. It was made of flower-shaped noodles, to wish the future parents-in-law good health.

Later came bún rối, with its thick strands. It is the noodle of Phú Đô that people know today. In the past, the village passed the craft only to its own people. Now it has spread to other places too.

Bún needs only two things, rice and water. For a noodle maker, choosing the rice matters most. In the old days, the village made its noodles only from fragrant tám rice, grown in its own fields. Now each family blends several kinds, guided by its own experience. The water must be clean for the noodles to come out white.

The noodle makers wash the rice again and again before they soak it. How long it soaks depends on the weather, longer in winter than in summer. Once the rice has soaked through, the worker grinds it into flour. Then the flour rests until it turns a little sour. After that, it is pressed very dry, so all the sour water runs out. Next the dough is boiled, then beaten smooth into a thick, supple paste.

When it is time to make the strands, the worker presses the dough through a mold. White strands fall straight into a pot of water boiling over the fire, and cook in just a few minutes. Skilled hands lift the noodles out and drop them at once into clean water. They gently swirl them back and forth, shaking lightly to rinse them clean. Lifting and rinsing the noodles is work for someone with real skill. Clumsy hands break the strands easily.

Machines now wash the rice, beat the paste and press the noodles, taking over most of the heavy work. But some steps must still be done by hand. Good bún has white strands, soft and supple, and it smells of rice.

Every day, small trucks, cyclos, motorbikes and bicycles loaded high carry the noodles into the city. The villagers say that more than half of all the bún eaten in Hanoi comes from Phú Đô.

The god of the dream and the founder of the craft are both worshipped in the village communal house. In some years, when the village holds its festival in the first lunar month, young men of the village shoulder a palanquin of bún. In the tellings of the village, bún was the food of hard times. On that day, it has a palanquin all its own, carried among the palanquins of the gods.