Sam Park's first lesson in pho came in 1996, in the small kitchen of Tran Thi Lien, who lived in the apartment below his family on West 28th Street in Cleveland and who had cooked in a noodle house in Hue before she emigrated in 1985.
Lien made pho broth roughly every two weeks. The pot went on at eight in the evening and stayed on the smallest burner of her stove until ten the next morning, fourteen hours later.
She did not believe in twelve. She had tested twelve, and she had tested sixteen, and she had settled on fourteen, which is the number Sam still uses.
Her bones were a mix: two pounds of beef knuckle, two pounds of marrow, one pound of oxtail. She charred a large onion and a four-inch piece of ginger directly over a gas burner until they were almost completely black on the outside, and added them to the pot.
Her spices were a small muslin bag of star anise, cassia bark, cloves, fennel seed, coriander seed, and a single black cardamom pod, the last of which Sam did not learn the name of for several years and which is, in his view, the single ingredient that distinguishes good pho broth from average pho broth.
She salted the pot with about three tablespoons of kosher salt at the start, which is heretical to some pho cooks and which she did because she had found, over thirty years of practice, that the salt drew out the flavour of the bones over a long simmer in a way that adding it at the end did not.
The pot stayed at a true bare simmer all night. Lien did not believe in a rolling boil for pho. A rolling boil, she said, would cloud the broth and harden the marrow.
Park has confirmed this. A bare simmer, with the surface trembling, produces a broth that is clear and amber-gold. A boil produces a broth that is grey and slightly turbid.
By morning, the broth had reduced by about a quarter. Lien lifted the bones out, strained the broth through a fine-mesh sieve lined with a clean cotton cloth, and let it sit on the back of the stove for an hour to cool.
She did not skim the fat. The fat, she said, was where the flavour lived. She would use it on top of the bowl.
Park, who now makes the broth in his apartment in central Seoul once a month, follows Lien's process almost exactly.
He starts the pot at eight on a Friday evening. He sleeps. He gets up at three in the morning out of long habit, checks the simmer, adjusts the heat by a quarter turn if needed, and goes back to bed.
He gets up at seven, makes coffee, and lets the pot go for another three hours. At ten he strains it. By eleven the broth has cooled enough to ladle into one-quart containers for the freezer.
He keeps eight quarts of broth at any given time in the freezer drawer. The broth lasts him a month of weekday lunches, eaten at the small table by the window with a bowl of cooked rice noodles, a few slices of raw beef that cook in the hot broth, a handful of bean sprouts, a sprig of Thai basil from the planter on the windowsill, and a wedge of lime.
Han Yujin, his partner, prefers the broth with the meatballs from the Vietnamese grocery on Itaewon-ro and a great deal of sriracha. Park makes them both bowls on Saturday mornings, when Han is home from her hospital shift.
The broth, Park has found, freezes well for about two months. After that the flavour begins to flatten. He has not figured out exactly why.
He has tried, over the years, to shortcut the process. Six-hour broth, eight-hour broth, ten-hour broth. None of it is bad. None of it is the broth Lien made.
Fourteen hours, with the bones charred properly and the spice bag put together with care and the salt added at the beginning, produces a broth that holds the shape of the spoon for a half-second after the spoon is lifted out.
Lien died in 2014, in Cleveland, at seventy-three. Park flew back from Seoul for the funeral. Her daughter Tran Mai gave him the muslin spice bag her mother had used for thirty years, which is still the bag Park uses, washed gently in cold water after each batch and dried on the radiator.
He does not believe the bag itself contributes anything. He uses it because it was hers.
On a Saturday morning, with the broth simmering its last hour and the kitchen warm and the windows fogged at the bottom, Park sometimes thinks of Lien's small kitchen in Cleveland and of the way she would lean against the doorframe with a cup of tea and watch the pot.
He has not improved on her method. He does not expect to. He makes the broth the way she made it, and he eats it, mostly alone at the small table by the window, on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, for the next three weeks.
