Love me Tender, Love me Sweet, and Soak me in Wine

A story of the dish that travelled outside its terroir and gained the taste for another place.

In her first episode of “The French Chef” in 1963, Julia Child made boeuf bourguignon. Wonder if she knew that half way around the world, in a country whose headlines probably shared much airtime with her cooking show in those years, there were people who did not only replicate the dish, but made an adventure out of it and created bò sôt’vang. Bò sô’t vang is what Vietnam did with boeuf bourguignon, in a similar way that Vietnam took the baguette and turned it into bánh mì. Vietnam took out the clear, immediately pleasing olive oil, thyme, parsley, and put in subtle, complex, slow-cooking cinnamon, cardamom, star anise and annatto seeds. Bò sôt’vang is the dish that left Burgundy’s blue sky and rolling landscapes of vineyards to come to Indochina’s fiercely flowing red rivers, monsoon rains of the South and wet and windy winters of the North.

Like Julia Child, Vietnam adored French food. It absorbed French influences many years before Americans came to love French food. But Vietnamese cuisine did not lose itself in French food, did not worship and did not fuse. It humbly took note, was somewhat seduced, but ultimately remained indifferent. It doesn’t evolve into a world where chefs are celebrities and cooking shows are primetime television. It doesn’t label “classically trained” chefs as those who reduce sauces, cook root vegetables sous-vide, pan sear fish and make perfect soufflé. But it remains a culinary experience of the people, who learn cooking at home, with basic equipments and everyday ingredients.

The way bò sô’t vang came about, we always imagined, was when a Vietnamese woman tasted boeuf bourguignon and remembered how it tasted and how it smelled. She didn’t have recipes and specialist supermarkets. She guessed how it must have been cooked and used ingredients whose flavors she could imagine. She even substituted red wine with vine leaves. She made it for the family to enjoy and later on she invited guests to taste. From this point, like with all other dishes in the Vietnamese repertoire, bò sô’t vang was passed on from mother to daughter, from family to family. In the absence of cookbooks, cooking shows, food critiques and ranked restaurants, the dish is preserved only by the power of word-of-mouth and the memory of the palate.

That was still the way we learned bò sôt’vang a few years ago in Woodside. We would drive our grocery to the most reluctant culinarily talented couple we knew and crashed their dinner, pretending to contribute with whatever we had picked up that afternoon. We love the dish because like a good companion, it was slow to simmer but quick to comfort. When it’s getting cold outside and we are feeling weary inside, our most acute need is perhaps the very basic one, to be fed spoonfuls of a warm, sweet, and spiced stew.

These days we still have an appetite for bò sô’t vang, which is why we have started making it at Bánhmì11. But we are learning that apart from a good appetite, more experimenting and better technique is needed. Last week the soup was so overwhelmingly sweet from bone marrow stock that you could pour it over noodles and make pho sô’t vang. Corn flour made the soup opaque and cancelled out the vibrant colors of tomatoes. And while coriander added a nice garnish, it only looked good in the beginning but bemused the taste.

So…while we measure our experience with bò sô’t vang in years, it has been around for decades. It has travelled far and long through space and time. If a dish can do that, how can we not love it and follow it?

Photo Credits: Boni Lin

Posted on: 11.09.2009