Look grandma, I am writing about your favourite dish for the world to see!

So, there goes the first line of the first entry of my too long a-coming blog, and it just has to be for my late grandma whom I was named after, for she was a fine lady and she was that giant piece of my childhood. But more on that later.

This soup recipe is my grandma’s trademark. You talk about her, you talk about it. She’d have it for dinner and send some to little me and my brother. We loved it so much that she gave my mum the recipe. She’d serve it to people when they came over the house. When our family cat gave birth to some kittens and they were too little with no teeth, grandma even gave them this soup (back then, people had to think hard about what they could afford for dinner let alone paying for manufactured cat food).

It is necessary to mention the fact that in Saigon where I grew up, especially those early years after the war when Western food was not at all popular in Vietnam, this soup was definitely a strange dish to many. In our family, we called it “súp Tây” or “Western soup” instead of chicken soup or potato & carrot soup like what I now call it to you, because nobody was making it in Vietnam, nobody knew what it was, nobody but grandma Trần. And I never ever recalled any person who had this soup and did not like it, strange though it was to Vietnamese cuisine.

I see grandma in my dreams often, and when I do I’d always talk to her about stupid random things. If I could talk to her again now, I’d ask her where she’d learned to make this wonderful soup, after asking where she’d been off to all this time… That is of course impossible. All I can do is to guess that she’d learned foreign cuisine during her time abroad alongside my late granddad who was an ambassador for the Northern Vietnam government. I won’t bore you with the Trần’s family history though.

Learning to make soup is not difficult but what made this recipe clever was grandma had adapted a foreign soup using Vietnamese ingredients while keeping the taste as good as it should have been. Grandma had used rice instead of (possibly) double cream to give the soup a creamy texture.

Living in London nowadays, I have had so many wonderful types of soup but, no offence to minted pea soup which is just amazing, grandma’s recipe is definitely the best to me.

Some potatoes, some carrot, chicken breast and a half a handful of long grain rice

All in a casserole pot.

World’s best chicken soup