Before we sit down at the dinner table, Duy Nguyen wants to make sure I get the pronunciation of our meal right.

The rice noodles swimming in hot, aromatic broth before us is called “fa?” not “faux” as many Torontonians say it, explains Nguyen, a member of the Vietnamese Association, Toronto.

Every word in the Vietnamese language has a melodic cadence and “pho” (phở in Vietnamese) ends in an inflection, like a question. It may sound complicated to those who don’t speak the language, but this dish, popular across the GTA and around the world, deserves respect.

“In Vietnamese, all of our words sound richer with accents,” says Nguyen. “It’s important to know that when you’re learning about pho.”

To understand the complexities of this dish, it’s important to look at how it’s made, its relatively short but storied history and how its global popularity was inadvertently boosted by the end of the Vietnam War 44 years ago this week.

Nguyen, his wife Han Trinh and friends Nga Duong and her husband Phan Dam, who arrived in Toronto over a 20-year span, are the ideal dinner companions to share the history of pho.

Dam, a retired engineering professor from Centennial College, was one of the first 50 Vietnamese people to immigrate to Toronto in 1969. Today there are about 37,000 Vietnamese-Canadians in Toronto, and roughly 74,000 in the GTA, according to Statistics Canada.

“Back in 1969, there was no such thing as rice noodles (in Toronto),” he says. “We used spaghetti for pho and the broth was awful because we couldn’t get the ingredients and didn’t know how to cook it.”

When I enter the kitchen, Trinh and Duong are tending two pots of broth simmering on the stove: one made from beef (pho bo), the other from chicken (pho ga). Duong says they could have shown me how it’s made from the very beginning, but they started preparing the beef bones at midnight.

Duong’s mother taught her to make pho before she went to university.

“My mom asked me to stand next to her,” recalled Duong. “She said when I have a family, I need to make pho.”

Now, she makes it at least once a month for her son-in-law who prefers hers to any restaurant variety. In the past she has held cooking classes for young people and parents of adopted Vietnamese children who wanted to learn to make a dish from their homeland.

Duong goes through the steps, first parboiling the oxtail, beef shank and beef bones to get rid of excess debris and fat. This ensures a clear and clean-tasting broth. The bones are then rinsed and left to simmer overnight with ginger, black cardamom, coriander, cinnamon, cloves, rock sugar, onions and star anise. The now-ultra tender beef shank is sliced into thin pieces that will top off each bowl. The broth is brought to a roaring boil before adding rice noodles, slices of raw beef, beef meatballs and tripe.

To contrast the rich and spiced broth, the beef pho is garnished with fresh Thai basil leaves, crunchy bean sprouts, a squeeze of lime and a splash of Sriracha.

We dig into our bowls and I can immediately taste the difference from the takeout pho I’ve tried. This broth is slightly thicker, having been left to simmer longer and the spices are more prominent. Everyone at the table picks up their bowl with two hands to drink all of the broth just as one would do at a ramen restaurant to show respect to the chef.

Another advantage of home-cooked pho is you can add as much meat as you want, Duong says.

It’s time to move on to the second bowl, the chicken pho.

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It is a simpler dish, says Duong. The broth needs to simmer for just two hours and there are fewer spices: star anise, ginger, onions, rock sugar, salt and the secret ingredient she picked up from a restaurant in Vietnam: tangerine peels.

Simpler, yes. But still a lot of work for a dish that typically hovers around the $10 mark at restaurants in the GTA.

The global popularity of pho has led to shortcuts such as soup and spice mixes. Even Campbell’s has a ready-made pho broth (I tried it, very bland). There are countless Instant Pot pho recipes that cut the simmering time, but there’s something about slurping a broth knowing the long hours spent making it that gives it an extra special taste. You don’t want a drop to go to wasted.

“A lot of young people now want fast food and don’t have a lot of time to spend on a dish,” says Trinh. “Some people still want to learn, but I doubt they’ll do it often unless it’s for other people. I have to be honest, I don’t make it often. Sometimes I’ll make a big batch and freeze it.”

Pho is intertwined with Vietnamese culture. Its current iteration has roots in the early 1900s near Hanoi in northern Vietnam, writes California-based cookbook author Andrea Nguyen in her James Beard 2018 Award-winning The Pho Cookbook.

The French began occupying Vietnam in the 1880s, bringing with them the baguette (planting the seeds for another iconic Vietnamese food, the banh mi) and a taste for beef. Before the French arrived, cattle were mainly used to work the fields. As the French consumed beef, the leftover bones were sold by butchers in Hanoi to street vendors, who turned the bones into broth for their noodles. The dish quickly caught on and restaurants started selling the noodle dishes, too.

As for the name, Andrea Nguyen writes that pho could have been a shortened version of nguu nhuc phan (beef with rice noodles), a dish with a hybrid Viet-Chinese name. Many street vendors at the time were Chinese. China also shares a border with Vietnam’s north so cultural overlap wasn’t unheard of. Chinese speakers will recognize that pho sounds similar to “fen,” the Chinese word for a type of flat noodle. Conversely, Cuong Huynh, a San Diego-based pho restaurant consultant and publisher of The Loving Pho site, writes in a post that the pho name could have spun off from the French dish pot au feu, a slow-cooked beef stew.

Its distinctive aromatics come from star anise and cinnamon which are native to northern Vietnam. In 1954, French occupation ended and Vietnam was split into northern and southern parts at the Geneva Conference. The split was to be temporary and many people from the north moved south, bringing along their richly flavoured pho broth. Meanwhile, pho in the warmer south Vietnam favoured additions such as fresh herbs, bean sprouts, chilli sauce and fermented bean sauces.

While northern and southern styles of pho began to intermingle, tensions rose between the communist-backed north and the American-supported south, leading to the Vietnam War.

The war ended on April 30, 1975. Duy Nguyen refers to that day as Black April, or the Fall of Saigon, when north Vietnamese forces took over Saigon, formerly the capital of South Vietnam (currently Ho Chi Minh City). Fearing political persecution, more than a million Vietnamese people fled the country and relocated to other parts of the world.

“A lot of people travelled across the Gulf of Thailand. Many died but some made it to the shores of Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia,” says Nguyen, who was part of that group and met his future wife, Trinh, at an Indonesian refugee camp in 1980. “That wave of people created a prominent international event called the Boat People, Vietnamese refugees in the mid-’70s to ’80s.”

From those refugee camps, the Vietnamese were relocated to countries such the United States, Australia, France, England, Germany and Canada. Nguyen adds that the local Vietnamese-Canadian community raised more than $400,000 to build a memorial to mark the arrival of Vietnamese refugees in Canada, which is slated to be unveiled in Mississauga later this year. “They brought with them their food culture,” he says. “The most famous one being pho, which is now being enjoyed by people everywhere.”

So really, it’s the story of pho that is complicated. The pronunciation isn’t so hard after all.