Pho Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Pho (phở in Vietnamese) is a Vietnamese noodle dish of flat rice noodles in a clear beef broth. It was born in northern Vietnam at the beginning of the twentieth century and only gradually made its way south to Huế and Saigon. Erica J. Peters, a historian of food in colonial Vietnam, describes the streets of Hanoi in 1919: Vietnamese vendors calling out "Yoc Pheu!" sold beef soup with flat rice noodles, while Chinese vendors competed with them, selling chicken or duck soup with wheat noodles. In 1931 the Vietnamese dictionary Việt Nam Tự điển gave phở an entry of its own.

Beef found its way into the soup only after it came into wider use under French rule, writes the historian Vu Hong Lien. For what happened next, the food writer Andrea Nguyen and the Encyclopaedia Britannica offer this account: the bones and meat left over from French-style slaughter were put to use in the cooking of xáo trâu, a local water-buffalo soup; they were joined with the flat rice noodles (bánh phở) sold at Chinese-run stalls; and the combination came together as one bowl at the street stalls of Hanoi. In Peters's picture of Hanoi in 1919, though, the people selling beef soup with rice noodles were Vietnamese, and the Chinese vendors were the ones selling wheat noodles. Just how the beef, the soup-making method and the rice noodles came together in one bowl is not settled in the way that account has it.

The name phở comes from the French feu, "fire", by way of pot-au-feu, the beef and vegetables simmered over the fire, and so the dish itself must have come from France. This etymology has followed pho around for a long time.

The sources do not bear the story out. For one thing, the food does not match. Pot-au-feu is a generous pot in which many kinds of vegetables are simmered at length; pho is a spare bowl of clear broth, rice noodles and beef. The distance between them is too great to see one as born from the other. For another, the sounds do not match. In a discussion on Language Log, where V. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania and others took up the word, no sound change leading from feu to phở is accepted, and the theory is set aside.

What settles the matter is the order of the documents. The comparison with pot-au-feu first appears in Gustave Hué's dictionary of 1937. Six years earlier, in 1931, the Vietnamese dictionary Việt Nam Tự điển had already defined phở as "from phấn: a dish of thinly sliced rice cake cooked with beef." Phấn is the Cantonese word 粉, "flour". A definition recording a Chinese origin for the word was there on its own before the comparison with the French feu appeared in print.

The Cantonese origin is now regarded as the strongest reading. On this view, the cry "beef noodles" (ngưu nhục phấn; ngau yuk fan in Cantonese) passed through nhục phở and lục phở, lost its final consonant and shrank to phở. The change raises no difficulty of sound, and "Yoc Pheu!", the cry Vietnamese vendors were calling out in Hanoi in 1919, is also taken to be a rendering of the same "beef noodles".

The name pho leads back not to a French stew but to a Cantonese cry that rang out in the streets of Hanoi.