The earliest recipes for the classic French stew, pot-au-feu (“pot on the fire”), were written by Marie Antonin Carême in L’art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle. Carême provides a lengthy introduction to his recipe, implying that the dish originated in 1789, during the French Revolution. Since 1789, recipes for pot-au-feu have found some variance, but all typically include (i) beef marrowbone and shanks, (ii) browned vegetables (leeks, onions, carrots, potatoes, rutabaga, celery), and (iii) spices (bouquet garni, cloves, peppercorns).
The once ubiquitous evening repast of 18th-century France, pot-au-feu is today a novelty. Understandably, the stew, whose broth requires long hours of slow-simmering over low heat, is unsuited to the pace of modern France. Instead, pot-au-feu harkens back to the modesty and touching virtues of slow-cooked peasant cuisine.
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Though the precise origins of Vietnamese phở are unknown, food scholars have recently related the dish to pot-au-feu. At a 2003 symposium on the origins of phở, Didier Corlou, former executive chef of the Sofitel Métropole hotel in Hanoi, linked phở and feu by their distinct use of marrowbone and charred vegetables. Indeed, the smoky, complex caramel flavors from browned onion and ginger are what set phở apart from other Asian broths.
Because I as a child exhibited a clear and unwavering tendency towards sloth, my mother would wake me ungodly early on mornings when she craved the stuff, committing us both to the 16-hour slough. I would lay my head sleepily on the kitchen counter, rousing myself intermittently to skim the fatty gray globules from the surface of the broth. For 8 years, we ate phở on the first and third Sundays of every month, plus a smattering of occasions in-between. We ate phở with such religious regularity that I came to recognize it as a sort of communion—with one another, but perhaps more importantly, with distant countrymen, lost relatives. Imbibed with such power and remembrance, the dish became an emblem of my mother’s homeland, a mysterious, verdant place, long since gone, glimpsed only in mouthfuls of familiar stew.
Quand on se gorge d’un potage
Succulent comme un consommé
Si notre corps en est charmé
Notre âme l’est bien davantage …
[When we fill ourselves with a soup as delicious as a consommé, it delights our bodies, and yet more our souls …]
