A Bowl of Pho: Kinh Bui

Kinh and his daughter Jennifer

In spite of the fact that Martin’s Tailoring is officially closed, the doorbell rings frequently. A constant stream of people comes through the door shivering and shaking off the cold of the rainy Saturday evening ready to don their fancy duds for the night’s festivities. One young girl sheepishly steps out of the dressing room in her cotillion dress. Meanwhile a professional dancer throws off her coat and changes into a floor length sequined dress. From their respective platforms both smile approvingly in the mirror, twirling around and imagining the evening to come.

Once the two women have indulged in their moment of vanity, the reality of their current surroundings sets it. The low ceilings of the workshop can barely hold the warmth emanating from the yellow walls covered with posters of the UVA golf team who have also taken their turn on these platforms. Vietnamese travel posters hint at the origins of the shop’s owners who quietly look on from the corner.

Kinh and Lan are standing, pin cushions at the ready, prepared to make any last adjustments. But the two tailors have already surpassed expectations. The women’s showers of praise are as glowing as if the pair had performed a miracle. And indeed the power of a well-fitting dress should not be underestimated.

Kinh does not suffer from any illusions of grandeur:

It’s a selfless sort of pleasure that is characteristic of this 50-something man. His life has been deferred in so many ways that he can very clearly identify the pleasures and joys in his life.

When I ask Kinh about pho, a soup that is as iconically Vietnamese as the hamburger is American, he recalls the recipe as a memory and a continuing source of comfort. “Pho and its aroma is my family.” Noodles and thinly sliced beef float in a spicy beef broth to which you add garnishes like jalapeno chile, mung bean sprouts, lime juice, fried shallots, and herbs as you slurp your way through the bowl.

Kinh met Lan when they were both students at the University of Agriculture in Saigon studying to be veterinarians from 1979 to 1982. They fell in love and decided to marry. But Lan’s mother did not approve of the relationship and did not trust Kinh’s devotion to her daughter. First there was the 4-year age difference. “She said to me, ‘you cannot love someone older than you’.” Then there was the issue of faith: “I was Catholic and she was Buddhist and her mom didn’t want us to marry.” At that time in Vietnam she wouldn’t have been alone in seeing faith as a defining feature.

At independence in 1954, the country was ruled by two different governments one communist in the north and another dictatorship in the south. These governments inscribed faith with new meaning. Kinh is from a family of landowners originally from the north of the country. After the communist government killed his grandfather and appropriated his land, his grandmother migrated southward, like many other Catholics.

The roots of pho mirror the migrations of this period. Originating in the north of the country it became popular in the south in the 1950s when those people fleeing communist rule brought the dish with them. In the south people added ingredients like green beans and different herbs, rau thom (literally translated as “fragrant leaves”).

After 20 years of rule by a regime in South Vietnam that favored Catholics, the communist takeover of Saigon in 1975 signaled a reversal of fortune for the country’s religious groups. One day on his way to school Kinh remembers seeing four coffins pass him and the next day four priests were executed in a square not far from his school.

“The communists used the stomach to rule you.” In the late 70s Kinh remembers eating sweet potatoes at nearly every meal. The government distributed food and with the exception of three days throughout the year, those rations did not include meat. On National Day, Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, and April 30 (the fall of Saigon to the communists) each family was given horsemeat, which was imported from Russia.

At this moment when religion had political and economic ramifications, Kinh and Lan defied convention. Their relationship was a radical subversion of the doctrine espoused by both South and North Vietnamese governments that your faith defines you. In part the young couple was spurred on by the support of his father who was a teacher at the Catholic school in Saigon. “He always said that it’s your heart not your faith that matters. You may go to church or temple but the faith doesn’t affect your way totally. You are more than your faith. Even now my wife and I have different faiths.”

According to Kinh the quality of the pho hinges on the deeply flavored broth, which tastes better when it’s made for a crowd. The particular balance of this elixir cannot be achieved on a small scale. Indeed that may be why Pho is Kinh’s favorite meal. It’s fundamentally communal nature muddles any arbitrary divisions.

Under early communist rule pho and comfort were in short supply. Not only were ingredients hard to come by but state-owned kitchens took the place of most restaurants. According to Kinh this all changed  in the late 80s when the Vietnamese government accepted US foreign aid. This brought greater access to a wider variety of food. Kinh was desperate for some pho. “You can eat pho every day at any time but I like to eat it for dinner because at that time the air is a little bit cooler and you can smell and taste it better.” It was the perfect excuse for Kinh and Lan’s forbidden rendezvous.

Given the fondness with which Kinh describes this nourishing soup, you might think that it was pho that weakened Lan’s mother’s resistance to marriage. But in the end she had in mind more practical concerns. In 1991 she and Lan went to the United States, joining her other daughter in the Charlottesville, Virginia. After a year and half in the United States Lan’s mother began to be concerned by her daughter’s prospects for marriage in their new home. At long last she conceded that Lan could return to Vietnam to marry Kinh. With the assurance that they would finally be together, Kinh found that waiting another five years for a visa was easy.  

However, when Kinh arrived in Charlottesville in 1997, he found that his mother-in-law was still suspect of the marriage. “My wife’s mother lived with me and my wife. We took care of her. One day after 11 years she said to me, ‘you are a very good man.’ It was out of nowhere!” he laughs, still shocked to this day, before adding with smile, “but it was too late to get those 13 years back.”

Keeping the history of Vietnam alive is a priority for Kinh as he raises his daughter in the United States. He tells her stories of his youth and describes Saigon before it became Ho Chi Minh City but the most tangible aspect of his past is pho, which he continues to prepare in small batches for his wife and their thirteen-year-old daughter, Jennifer.  

Regionally American: Linda Schoyer

Each year when Thanksgiving rolls around I look forward to my aunt Linda's Corn and Oysters, which is delicious in spite of or perhaps because of its roots west of the Mississippi, so far removed from the Pittsburgh roots of the rest of my family. No one in my family of non cooks would have taken the time to experiment in the kitchen long enough to discover that buoys of grey oysters bobbing in a sea of creamed corn and topped with browned saltine crackers crumbs deserve a place on the Thanksgiving table. When I pressed her on the traditionalism of this odd union, she insisted that it has been a mainstay of the holiday for generations throughout her hometown in northeastern Colorado.

But recently I discovered that this isn't just a local favorite. Last weekend my cousin overheard a shopkeeper in Slanesville, West Virginia complaining that the seasonal influx of orders for canned oysters had begun. So, I wondered, what made this dish a hit among people in rural mountainous regions that are so far from the sea? People who can only find oysters in a can no less? Once a year Linda dares to save more and live better by shopping at Walmart. “It’s sad but they’re the only place in Pittsburgh that sells them.” What possessed her and others to serve corn and oysters on a day when food with a family or community history tend to hold sway?

It turns out that it hasn’t always been this difficult to get oysters. Americans have long had a love affair with oysters. According to Mark Kurlansky's “The Big Oyster”, Colonists adopted the taste of Native Americans early on, eating the bivalves morning, noon, and night. They ate them pickled, stewed, baked, roasted, fried and scalloped and in soups, patties and puddings. To satiate the city’s “oystermania,” New Yorkers started farming oysters on Long Island in the late 1800s. This spurred the commercialization of the oyster industry. By 1880, New York’s oyster farms were producing 700 million oysters a year shipping oysters all over the country. (Kurlansky links this enthusiasm for oysters to the growth of New York into a great city.) So, perhaps it was at this moment of oyster abundance that mountaineers seized the opportunity to eat a dish inspired by what they imagined the pilgrims on Plymouth Rock might have eaten at that first Thanksgiving feast?

Or maybe this corn and oysters casserole represent an embrace of another part of the country? Was it a riff on the cornbread oyster dressings so often found on Thanksgiving tables in the southern coastal United States? This dish is after all the perfect expression of the region’s terroir, a nod to the imprint that the land, climate, and people have made on the cuisine. Prime among the products that inform the region’s singular cuisine is corn. According to the folks at Anson Mills, a company dedicated to reviving the heirloom grains that sustained the antebellum kitchens of the Carolinas, many of America’s native corn species have their roots in the region.  What better complement to one of the region’s heritage agricultural products than the oyster, which thrives in estuaries where the fresh water from rivers meets the salt water of the sea? Recipes for this combination of regional goods abound. There are scalloped corn and oysters from Virginia, oyster-cornbread dressing from Louisiana and Alabama, and even Corn Oysters (which are corn fritters that resemble oysters).

Linda isn't sure how the dish made it's way onto her family's thanksgiving table but she was happy to share the recipe, beginning with this disclaimer: “I’m almost ashamed to tell you the recipe because it’s so simple.” Nevertheless here she is recalling the method:

(That laughter at 27” is yours truly imagining my version of “however much butter you like,” which is mountain-sized.)

Simple it may be but her casserole was good enough to win over my notoriously opinionated grandmother who requested it every year afterwards. On second thought, perhaps she warmed to this casserole that was so exotic to her Allegheny roots because of her love for the humble saltine.  

Those butter-bathed saltines give the dish a nice textural contrast which could be a kitsch vestige of the 1960s but the crackers actually have their origins in the 19^th century. Their story begins with Frank L. Sommers of St. Joseph, Missouri, a baker who made them for a 1876 county fair and won the blue ribbon for his creation. In 1890 the reach of the saltine cracker expanded when Sommer’s company merged with several other midwestern bakeries to form the American Biscuit Company. With the 1898 merger of American Biscuit Company and the New York Biscuit Company (later known as Nabisco) saltines began to be sold nationally.

Although the saltine cracker quickly became the antidote to upset stomachs across the country, these days the coupling of oysters and corn is less amicable.  Renewed support for oyster farming is reviving colonies in the Chesapeake Bay but it’s a struggle in the context of competition with watermen for territory. In the Mississippi Delta, the threat is more nebulous. Fertilizer runoff from corn farms in the Midwest flows into the Mississippi River where it has boosted algae and microbe growth in the Gulf of Mexico. The algae and microbes have consumed all of the oxygen in 5,800 square miles of water offshore, killing other marine life and creating the second largest deadzone in the world. Even in coastal regions where oysters reside, this nutrient-rich runoff has created low oxygen conditions, which weakens oysters’ ability to fight off disease. In the context of this toxic relationship between corn and oysters perhaps Linda’s casserole represents the remaining opportunity for these two staples of the American harvest to share a stage.

Our rebuff of Linda’s contribution to the Thanksgiving table as a regional oddity may have been misguided. You could say that in this dish we can see both the promise of American abundance as well as the consequences of a misguided use of our land and native species. What better day to remind us of the country’s diverse roots, of the human and agricultural kind alike, than on Thanksgiving? Well, that and you would be hard pressed to find a better way to showcase the potential greatness of a saltine.