Camilla Gibb Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Camilla Gibb shares the recipes and stories behind the foods featured in The Beauty of Humanity Movement.

Pho
In Hanoi, I befriended a young man and his wife over a shared love of food. In Vietnam, urbanites eat, on average, three meals and three snacks a day, and they are passionate and ritualistic about what gets eaten when, with whom and how. Food is acknowledged as far more than a source of sustenance. It is an expression of culture, a repository of history, an embodiment of identity and a means of unifying family and community.

Vietnamese food bursts with freshness, contrasting flavours and colour. There wasn't a thing I didn't devour and adore. Until the day I went to Phuong's house for dinner where I found myself confronted with a grey salad of par-boiled, diced pigs' ears. The cartilage crunched between my teeth in exactly the way you might imagine an ear might crunch between your teeth. I feigned pleasure, proclaimed it sublime, but my imagination could not serve me here.

The main event, fortunately, was a bowl of pho. Normally a breakfast food, Phuong nevertheless served this beef noodle soup because he was thinking of opening a pho restaurant, and he wanted to get my opinion. Although pho was born in the north, the recipe was carried to the south with the partition of Vietnam in the mid-1950s. In ...