I got to Bà's house late Saturday night. She'd left the porch light on and the kitchen light off. That meant the door was unlocked and she wasn't waiting up.
Her house used to be one story. After the flooding they raised the whole thing, so now the kitchen and the front room and the bedrooms are all on the second floor. Eighteen steps to get up there, with a small landing halfway where you can set down groceries or catch your breath. I carried my bag up and put it in the room that was storage before the house went up. I had the Monday off for Columbus Day. I try to come every few months, whenever I can get three days together.
When I woke up Sunday, Bà was already cooking.
There was a pot of broth on the stove. Beef bones, a pork leg, a piece of beef shank. She'd already done the first boil, where you cook everything once, pour off the cloudy water, rinse the bones, and start over. I'd slept through that part. Now she was skimming foam with a little wire strainer, moving her hand in slow circles across the top.
"You're up," she said.
"I brought oranges from Dad's tree."
She pointed at the counter without looking. I set the bag down and poured coffee. It was ten to seven.
From the kitchen window I could see her yard. Garden beds along the back fence, a big clay pot of lemongrass, a fig tree that had gotten too tall to pick from the ground. When I was a kid the kitchen was downstairs and you could walk straight out the back door onto the grass. From up here the yard looked smaller. I could see over the neighbor's fence to the roof of their truck.
"We're making bún bò Huế," she said. That's a spicy beef noodle soup her mother used to make in Huế. "And chả giò." Fried rolls. "You're rolling."
I'd rolled them before. I wasn't good at it yet.
She brought up six stalks of lemongrass from the pot in the yard. She peeled off the tough outer layers, took the thick pale base of each stalk, and hit it twice with the back of her knife. Hard. The kitchen filled up with that sharp green smell that's in about half of what she cooks.
She dropped the cracked stalks in the broth and pointed at the tender inner pieces left on the cutting board. "Those are for the saté. Not yet."
She turned the heat down until the broth was barely moving. Tiny bubbles at the edges, the surface just trembling.
"If it boils hard, it goes cloudy. Then you can't fix it."
I knew that. She told me every time.
She had me peel shallots while she worked on the shrimp paste. She spooned some into a small bowl, added a ladle of hot broth, stirred it once, and set it on the counter.
"You wait. The heavy part sinks. Then you pour off the clear part on top. If you stir it again, you start over."
I watched her move around the kitchen. She was slower than last time, or maybe I just noticed it more now that the visits are spaced out. She held the edge of the counter when she reached for a high shelf. Her knees were bad on the stairs. That morning I'd heard her coming up from the yard one step at a time, stopping on the landing. Eighteen steps between her kitchen and her garden. She didn't mention it.
By ten the broth had been going four hours. She poked the beef shank with a chopstick. It went in, but it took some pushing.
"If it falls apart now, you can't slice it later."
She set the meat on a plate by the window to cool. I went to open the window wider, then checked my phone first. Air quality was 63. Yellow. Better than last week, when it was orange three days running and the whole neighborhood smelled like smoke from somewhere else.
"It's fine," I said, and opened it.
It was eighty-six degrees at ten in the morning, in October. The air just sat there, warm and still. Bà had already moved on to the next thing.
She showed me how to cut the soft lemongrass for the saté, which is the spicy chili oil that goes on top of the soup. Long strips first, then across into tiny pieces.
"Thinner," she said. "You want it to disappear into the oil."
I cut thinner.
She heated oil in a small pan with annatto seeds until it went dark orange-red, then fished the seeds out. Added the lemongrass, minced garlic, dried chili flakes. Stirred slow.
"You cook this until it gets sticky. The spoon leaves a line and the oil comes up around the edges. Too early, it's just paste. Too long, it's burnt."
She stirred for fifteen minutes. When she was done it was shiny and dark red, with a thin layer of oil floating on top.
"That's right," she said.
When she was cooking, that was about as much praise as she gave out.
She'd made the filling for the rolls the night before. Ground pork, shrimp I'd brought down in a cooler, chopped mushrooms, glass noodles cut short, grated carrot. She said the Gulf shrimp at Hong Kong Market were too small now and cost twice what they used to. She didn't say why. She just said she was glad I brought them.
She had me squeeze the carrot in a towel.
"Again."
I squeezed again. A few more drops came out.
"If it's wet, the wrapper splits open in the oil."
The wrappers were thin dry sheets of rice paper. She dipped one in warm water for a few seconds, long enough to soften it but short enough that it still held its shape. Laid it on a damp towel. Put a small line of filling near the edge, folded in the sides, rolled it tight. Four seconds, maybe five.
"Now you."
My first one was loose. She could tell before I finished.
"Less filling. Tighter on the first turn. That's where you set it."
She'd said the same thing last visit. Same words.
My second was better. My third was close to hers. She put them on the tray without saying anything, which meant they were good enough.
We kept rolling. She made three for every two of mine. Her hands never hurried and never stopped either. I don't know how many thousands of these she's rolled in her life. I'd guess she quit thinking about it a long time ago.
"Bà, did you grow cilantro this year?"
She shook her head. "Bolted in two weeks. Went straight to flower before I could pick any."
She said it the way you'd say the store was out of something.
"There's rau răm in the garden. And mint. Use those."
Rau răm is a Vietnamese herb, peppery and a little sharp. She kept it in a pot in the shade of the fig tree, where she could water it every day if she went down the stairs. The mint had taken over a whole bed, and she let it.
Around noon I sliced the meat.
"Across the grain," she said. "Always across. Thinner than you think."
I cut a slice. She held it up to the window. I could almost see through it.
"Close. A little thinner."
The next one was thinner. She didn't pick it up, but she nodded once. Then she went back to the shrimp paste and poured the clear liquid off the top, slow, leaving the sediment in the bottom of the bowl.
Before frying I checked the air again. Still yellow, 61. I opened the window over the stove too so air could move through.
Bà heated oil in a deep pot until the surface shimmered and lowered in four rolls with long chopsticks.
"Don't touch them. Let the wrapper set."
The rice paper puffed up in little bubbles and went golden brown in patches. She turned them once, then lifted them out onto a rack to drain.
"Wait for the oil to come back up before the next ones. If you rush it, they soak up oil instead of frying."
I waited. She told me when.
While the rolls drained she put together a plate of herbs and greens. Thai basil and mint from the garden, and the rau răm, which I'd picked and carried up in a strainer, shaking the water off on the landing. She added thin-sliced red cabbage, bean sprouts, lime wedges. It all went on her blue plate, the one with the chip in the rim. She said the chip gave it character.
I cooked the round rice noodles and rinsed them in cold water. She ladled broth into bowls, then noodles, then the sliced meat, then a spoonful of red saté on top. The broth was clear and deep. Little circles of chili oil spread out across it.
We ate at the table by the window. Below us was her yard. The lemongrass in its pot, the fig tree, mint everywhere. Next door the neighbor's house was raised up too. The space underneath, where they used to park, was just concrete now with a hose coiled on it and some plastic chairs.
The soup was right. I knew because she didn't say anything about it. She just ate, adding more saté, squeezing lime, tearing rau răm into her bowl with her fingers. I did the same. The rau răm tasted the way it should. Peppery and clean, with a little bite at the end.
After lunch she taught me the caramel for cá kho tộ, fish braised in a clay pot with a dark sweet sauce. We weren't making it today, but she said I should learn while I was here.
She put sugar in a dry pan and watched it melt. She didn't stir. She just tilted the pan slowly so the sugar moved around.
"The time between right and burnt is shorter than you think."
The sugar went from pale gold to amber to the color of strong coffee. She pulled it off the heat and added a splash of water. It hissed and spat and she held the pan steady until it settled down.
"That's the color," she said. "Remember it."
I looked at it. Dark and clear, somewhere between honey and molasses. I tried to keep it in my head the way she kept it, as something I'd know when I saw it again.
She put the caramel in the fridge for tomorrow, washed the pan, and hung it up. I wiped the counter and wrapped the extra herbs in a damp towel and put them in the crisper. She turned off the broth. The kitchen got quiet.
"Tomorrow," she said. "I'll show you the fish."
I said okay.
She went to lie down in the front room. I stood at the kitchen window and looked at her garden.
The lemongrass was tall and green in its pot. The mint was everywhere. The rau răm sat in the shade by the hose, where she'd put it. Along the back fence there was some basil, and a bare patch of dark soil with nothing in it. I didn't know what used to grow there. I'd never thought to ask, and she hadn't said.
I figured she'd plant something. She usually did. But from up here it was just a small dark square, and I couldn't tell if the soil was any good.
- Vietnamese gardens in Algiers: A 2026 Verite News report found that most households in Lower Algiers's Woodlawn neighborhood maintain small backyard gardens while also pursuing a stalled plan for flood-fighting parkland along the neighborhood's edges.
- Cilantro and warm seasons: LSU AgCenter guidance on culinary herbs confirms that cool-season plants like cilantro bolt rapidly in Louisiana's warming shoulder seasons, shortening the harvest window that home gardeners have relied on.
- Smoke from unexpected sources: In October 2023, an underground wetlands fire near Bayou Sauvage produced smoke across Greater New Orleans, and the city distributed N95 masks at locations including the Algiers Regional Library while advising residents to keep windows closed.
- Houses going up after floods: Jefferson Parish defines elevation projects as lifting an existing structure above anticipated flood levels, a process that can place a former ground-floor kitchen a full story above the yard it once opened onto.
