Fusion in a bowl

            Boston is commonly associated with perfectly cooked beans and creamy clam chowder.  Since the mid 1970s a growing number of Vietnamese have moved into the Boston area now numbering 20,000, congregating around the Fields Corner area of Dorchester Avenue they have created a vibrant hodgepodge of shops.  Some entrepreneurs cater to the young couples with wedding dresses and formal gowns others offer medical services.  The most common sight are restaurants selling a variety of dishes.  Most Americans learn about Vietnamese food through a bowl of soup that was recently ranked 28^th by CNN on a list of the 50 most delicious foods in the world. Pho (pronounced feu) has a deeper history, one that time has washed away.

            A perfect bowl soup is hard to come by; it creeps up on you when you least expect it.  My first taste of pho was in a strip mall in Southern California with college friends looking to try something new rather than another oil-drenched Chinese-Thai hybrid meal.  The soup was a revelation, a perfect combination of deeply flavored beef broth and tender pieces of meat steeped until tender, with al dente noodles and fresh herbs.  The contrast of flavors and the ability to concoct your own combination of flavors by adding your own amounts of sweet Thai basil, cilantro, lime juice, hoisin sauce and chili sauce gave my taste buds infinite possibilities of flavor. 

            Pho is the national dish of Vietnam and for good reason; it feeds millions of people from morning into lunch and even dinner.  The soup is flexible and malleable with multiple permutations utilizing every cut of the beef.  You can get your pho with tender slices of tendon, flank, and even meatballs.  Or try the other popular preparation with chicken.  Through the years a disconnection has occurred, this soup has its roots deeper in the history of Vietnam, specifically with the Chinese and French colonialists. 

            The act of making and preparing soups were introduced by the Chinese to the Vietnamese (The Chinese controlled modern day Vietnam for over a thousand years leaving behind their religious attitudes, culture and food) they also brought the distinctive noodles we find in Pho from Guangdong, China made with rice flour. 

            Pho would not be what it is today without the mighty beef cattle having been introduced by the French colonialists who started coming in 1859 initially as part of missionary operations.  During their conquest of Vietnam and it’s neighbors the French grew tired of the local proteins such as pigs and chickens and imported cattle to French Indochina to get their fix.  Similar to the African-American food traditions that adapted the lesser cuts of meat and created such delicacies such as pigs feet, collard greens with neck bones, the origins of pho are similarly modest.  Making culinary history with scraps is how pho was born.  The French would slaughter large amounts of beef, but the bones and off cuts would not be used.  The Vietnamese who were primarily subsisting on rice and small amounts of vegetables saw the opportunity to make delicious food from the scraps of the Frenchmen’s cattle.  Like many of the great national dishes from around the world the origins are humble and come from ingredients that you might not expect.  The Vietnamese learned to stretch the little meat they had access to and create intense flavors, building on the traditions and influences of their homeland and those of the Chinese and the French.   

            Although there is scant documentation about the exact origins, Dider Corlou (a celebrated chef who has studied the foods of Vietnam) believes that Pho is a derivation from the French dish pot a feu.  The first connection is from the sound of the dish; feu and pho are the same pronunciation.  This pronunciation is a Vietnamese adaptation from the French word.   Pot a feu is also a soup that uses a deep and complex beef stock.  The comparisons extends to the preparation of the bones to make consume or stock there is the addition of grilled onions, which adds a distinctive flavor and color to the final broth. Pho represents the Vietnamese ability to adapt and resist their foreign invaders.

            This soup has become the national food of Vietnam; it shows how cultural influences have been filtered through the Vietnamese lens to produce a dish that shows elements of the past but maintains Vietnamese identity. Pho was first produced in the Northern city of Hanoi only a hundred years ago, not as a street food but rather a soup sold by hawkers who would go door to door.  It spread to the south and other provinces after the first Vietnam War against the French ended in 1954 when millions of northerners moved to the southern city of Saigon now Ho Chi Minh City.  Since soup was a ubiquitous food served throughout the country the way these northerners differentiated themselves was by selling pho.  As pho gained in popularity the southerners put their own spin on it, including different herbs and the use of hoisin sauce. Due to the mass exodus of southerners to the United States in 1975 we typically see this type of preparation in American restaurants. The advent of pho’s spread is mirrored by the rise street food, which is also a relatively recent phenomenon in Vietnam only dating from the 1950’s.

            Pho is a perfect example of fusion in a bowl.  The stock adapted from the French, the noodles and allspice from China.  The true Vietnamese culinary ingenuity comes from the use of Saigon cinnamon (a less spicy and more earthy cousin to the common cinnamon) and the fresh herbs.  Many a pho connoisseur will grade establishments on their freshness and variety of these condiment plates.  The combination of long cooked beef broth with the added freshness of cilantro, basil, mung beans, a dab of hoisin sauce and lime wedges adds an acidity and lightness that is not found in any another soup.  In the bottom of a bowl of pho three cultures are combined, this is not fancy modern fusion where cultures are haphazardly thrown on a plate for the sake of being avant-garde.  This is slow fusion, one where the countries flavors are still distinct and discernible but have slowly melded over time.