It’s hot out, you should be eating hot soup
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A bowl of bun bo hue, a Vietnamese noodle soup. Millions of people in some of the world’s hottest places have long known that one of the best ways to cool down in summer is to eat hotter food.
PHOTO: JANICE CHUNG/NYTIMES
Rachel Gurjar
NEW YORK – In Mumbai, India, office workers gather around lunch trucks as vendors ladle bubbling paya, a slow-cooked goat trotter soup, into bowls, steam rising into the already humid air. Hunched over stools in Hanoi, Vietnam, people slurp scalding pho at noon. The heat outside is brutal. Nobody seems to mind.
In New York, chef Nhu Ton is one of those people. She grew up in central Vietnam, where there are only two seasons: the rainy one and the hot one. “We eat hot food all the time,” she said. “It’s always soup.”
