The scent pierces through the air, half like fresh lime and half like mint, liberating. The broth is fulfilling like juice from a just-ripe fruit, coating every strand of vermicelli and making them supple like newly washed hair. There is red, white, bright green, fall-leaf yellow green, and the earthy sepia tone of bone meat. My first bowl of bún bung.
Bún bung is a noodle soup of the North. Not having been to Hanoi, I learnt about bún bung from the interweb and tasted it via imagination. My mom has heard of it, but Saigon doesn’t have it, and I don’t know how popular it is in Hanoi today. It wouldn’t surprise me if the old fashion noodle soup is only half surviving in the baskets of old ladies dressing in brown and having their teeth dyed black. Anyway, it has a funny name. Bún (pronounced like “boon” with a quick rising accent) is just the usual rice vermicelli. Bung (pronounced like “bung” in “übung” in German – English doesn’t have this sound) is the method of cooking: stir fry first, then simmer until boil in water. There’s no adequate translation of the name into English, other than “bung noodle soup”. But to me, it’s funny because bung sounds like boom, or bloom (as in flower blooming). For sure, the soup is a flavor bouquet.
Compared to other noodle soups, bún bung requires little time, few ingredients, and not so much attention. It is sort of close to canh chua (sour soup) in the South, but instead of fish they use pig trotters to get the protein sweetness, and instead of rice it’s eaten with bún. It’s also a little close to canh bún cá (fish noodle soup, also of the North), except for the sour taste, because of the use of rau ngổ (L. aromatica, or rice paddy herb, top right corner in the above picture).