At a table in the middle of the room, some Siamese were having their lunch. We sniffed appreciatively as we went by, and when a waiter came to our table, we asked him what was in the pot. But our waiter understood no English. Neither did the other waiter, nor yet the customers. We reverted to sign language and eventually got charcoal burner, pot, and ingredients of our own. Obviously suspecting that we didn't know how to cook, the waiter insisted on doing our cooking for us. When the broth in the pot was boiling, he broke the greens (rather like mustard greens and scallions) into appropriate lengths and tossed them in. After them went a generous handful of transparent vermicelli. Next came the meat, chopped not in a grinder but with a knife. It was part lean beef and part liver, and an egg had been broken over it. The waiter mixed meat and egg together with a pair of chopsticks and dropped lumps of the mixture into the pot. As a last thought, he shoved in a few squares of tofu, that Chinese cream cheese made of beans instead of milk. Making signs that we were not yet to serve ourselves, he went back to the kitchen to get our bowls of rice and a series of little saucers which served their true etymological purpose of holding sauces. There was an extremely peppery sauce and a sweetish sauce that turned out to be peppery, too, once you had it in your mouth. Hai looked around for his native fish sauce and successfully explained what he wanted by drawing a map of Indochina and indicating that he came from Saigon. Everyone in Bangkok knows that the Saigonese put fish sauce on everything: He got his nuoc mam.
Now we were allowed to eat. The waiter served us each a bowl of his concoction, which Hai ate properly, dipping each morsel with his chopsticks in one of the sauces and lapping up a bit of rice after it. But I believe in simplification and was still a little uncertain with chopsticks. I dumped a little of each sauce into my bowl and ate happily if unorthodoxly with my spoon. It couldn't have tasted better.
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