In Chapter Eleven of Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, the narrator Bình recounts the days he spent accompanying Chef Blériot to the marketplace in his hometown of Saigon and how a slow courtship unfolded over conversations about cooking and walks to obtain fresh groceries. Of the peripheral characters mentioned in this scenario, some of the most compelling are the three young boys Blériot would hire to carry the bags of produce on each of his excursions with Bình. Prior to their employment with Blériot, Bình states, the only work they could find to sustain themselves was watching over the street vendors’ stalls in the market during the moments when the vendors had to step away. It is the image of the payment that those three unnamed boys received in exchange for this work that remains lodged in Bình’s mind years into the future, and understandably so, given the precise and startling details he observes about it and the boys’ companionship.
Truong writes that the boys would be paid with “the last slurp of broth from the vendor’s lunchtime bowl of phỏ. Lukewarm, beefy, but with no beef left, just a flotilla of broken noodles, and, if they were lucky, at the bottom of the bowl a bit of gristle that had been bitten off and spat back into the broth” (Truong 114). The three would share this meager amount of broth equally between themselves, an unwavering camaraderie and a recognition of their stakes in each other’s survival taking precedence over the doubtlessly keen hunger they must have been experiencing in unison. The first time they are hired by Blériot, they manage to earn enough money to pay for three bowls of phở by charging a price he is too new to Vietnamese currency to refute. As their employment continues, Blériot becomes more market-savvy and cuts their pay by two-thirds, which if we are still considering money in terms of phở, would equate to one bowl of the soup, shared equally among the boys as the money is. Still, Bình states that this is likely more than they could have hoped to earn in any other job they would have been able to find.
As is indicated by their presence in the Saigon market of Bình’s day, phở is likely the creation of innovative street food vendors, in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and around the region of Hanoi in Vietnam. Some people trace the origin of the dish back to a village named Van Cu in the Nam Dinh Province, approximately sixty miles away from Hanoi, due to the longstanding traditions of expert phở preparation and proliferation of phở shops in the area. According to the theory put forth by Dung Quang Trinh, there was a great deal of cultural interplay and exchange occurring between French, Chinese and Vietnamese people in Hanoi. The French, as the colonial power in Vietnam at the time, had quite a substantial presence, and they tended to slaughter cows to prepare steaks and other beef dishes, despite the fact that prior to their arrival, the Vietnamese had used the animals mostly to aid in farm labor rather than as a source of food.
After the arrival of the French, however, butchers in Hanoi began selling the scraps and bones that were left over once French consumers had received their shares. While it took some time for the meat to gain popularity, street food vendors in particular sensed an opportunity and began selling a beef version of the noodle soup that was traditionally prepared with water buffalo meat. Over time, this new creation gained popularity particularly amongst Chinese and ethnic Vietnamese workers, many of whom were employed by French and Chinese merchant ships sailing the Red River, due to the savory nature of the bone broth, the flavorful bits of meat, and the quick convenience involved in consuming it. Throughout the decades, phở has gone through many creative developments, including a chicken version of the dish named phở gà, and the addition of various ingredients peanut oil and tofu.
The name phở might be a shortened form of the Vietnamese-Cantonese title for the dish, “ngưu nhục phấn” which translates to “beef with rice noodles,” as well as a reference to the noodles used in the dish, bánh phở. These are flat rice noodles, white in color, and can be found today in both dried and fresh forms. Interestingly, however, a theory persists that the name actually originates from the French word “feu” (fire) in reference to the dish “pot-au-feu,” which is a boiled beef dish that some argue is the ancestor of phở. This urge to attribute a fundamental Vietnamese dish to the cuisine of those who colonized the country is interesting to examine, and writer Andrea Nguyen argues that there is little evidence to support a direct connection between the two dishes due to the lack of many vegetables in phở. From the early years of its existence up to the present, phở has been lauded as one of the most versatile and beloved food items in Vietnamese cuisine, such as by the renowned Vietnamese poet Tu Mo, who in 1934 wrote an ode to the dish that ties it to national identity and Vietnam’s desire for self-determination.
The role of those bowls of phở, sometimes multiplying, sometimes one divided in many parts, in the little vignette that Bình narrates within his own dually coming-of-age and exile story, is multifaceted. In giving us a description of phỏ that is concerned only with its dregs, Truong nudges us to begin from the end in our perception of the dish–reconstructing the full flat rice noodles from the broken pieces, the pieces of meat from the chewed bits of gristle, the piquant and flavorful broth from the watery remains at the bottom of the bowl. The reader is thus also presented with an understanding of how the process of colonization takes hold of culture and resources and results in fragmentation and loss. It is the bond between the three boys in the marketplace, however, that gives both us and Bình a notion of faith and resilience, of the kind of connection that allows for survival and community even in the direst of circumstances.
Works Cited
Nguyen, Andrea. “The History of Pho,” Viet World Kitchen, 18 March 2018, https://www.vietworldkitchen.com/blog/2018/03/the-history-of-pho.html.
Truong, Monique. The Book of Salt: A Novel. United States, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.
“The History of Phở.” Vietvana, 23 June 2020, vietvana.com/the-history-of-pho/.
The hypothesis of the origin of “phở” coming from French is something to think about because most Vietnamese (and most foods from European colonies) are called by their English translations when referred to by non-Vietnamese people. Phở is an exception, I would think, at least for most people (e.g. people order “phở” directly vs ordering another dish that is just called by its English name/translation). So, it’s strange to me how one would think that “phở” actually was named after a French dish, rather than some word or phrase in Vietnamese that would describe the dish.