01 A shortage and a yolk

The attribution needs careful handling. The version in circulation comes from the son of Nguyen Giang, founder of Hanoi's Giảng café, who maintains that it was his father who developed the recipe in those years. It is a family attribution, not an independently verified fact, and it should be taken as such.

What is firm is the context: the milk shortage in the late 1940s, and the fact that the drink is identified with Hanoi and with no other city in the country. That says a good deal about where the problem was solved.

02 What is in it and why it works

Four ingredients: egg yolk, sugar, condensed milk and robusta coffee. The yolks are whipped with the sugar and the condensed milk until they form a cream, and that mixture is heated very carefully in a water bath. Over direct heat the egg would curdle.

The lipids in the yolk emulsify with the coffee and neutralise the bitter tannins. This is not a whim: it is chemistry.

That detail explains why the combination not only holds up but improves the coffee it starts from. Vietnamese robusta is intense and markedly bitter; the fat in the yolk trims that harshness without masking the flavour, which is exactly what cream does in other traditions and what the missing milk had been doing.

Three glass cups of coffee topped with yellowish foam, each inside a bowl — two green and one black — on a grey marble tray resting on a low wooden table; a long-handled metal spoon sticks out of each cup. Behind, in dim light, someone's seated legs.
The foam layer takes up almost half the glass. Beneath it the coffee stays dark and unmixed until you stir it.mmmmngai@rogers.com / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0·CC BY-SA 2.0

03 How it is served

With a spoon, and that is not a minor detail. You eat the foam first with the spoon and then drink the coffee underneath. There are two textures and two moments, and downing it in one is missing half the point.

The other feature of the service is the vessel. The glass sometimes arrives sitting inside a bowl of hot water, or on a small candle, to keep it from cooling. It makes sense: a cold yolk cream loses its texture, and in a Hanoi winter, at a January mean of 16.6 °C, the drink cools quickly.

On a wooden tray, a ribbed glass with a white layer below and a beige foam dusted with cocoa above, beside a small glass jug of black coffee and a printed card reading "EGG COFFEE". Next to it, a blue plate with a croissant and, behind, a cane chair and a fan.
The modern café version, with the coffee served separately to pour yourself. The recipe is the same; the staging is not.Souradeep Dasgupta / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0·CC BY 4.0

04 Where to drink it

Today it is served in cafés across Vietnam, so no pilgrimage is required. But the drink makes most sense where it was born: in Hanoi's Old Quarter, in a narrow place entered down a corridor, with low tables and stools, and the glass sitting in its bowl of hot water.

Narrow, tightly packed façades on an Old Quarter street: on the left a whitewashed modern building, in the centre an old ochre stucco house with a curved pediment, an iron balustrade and plants growing out of the cornices, and new blocks on the right. Below, awnings, shop signs and a line of parked motorcycles.
The kind of street these cafés are on: four-metre frontages, old houses between new blocks and the business on the ground floor.Christophe95 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0·CC BY-SA 4.0

And drink it in the cool season, between October and December. A hot cream of yolk and thick coffee wants an ambient eighteen or twenty degrees, not July's mean of twenty-nine. The drink was invented in a city with a winter, and that is part of why it works too.

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Lucía Montes

Worth Knowing editor · Flowtravel

Lucía chases the story behind the everyday object.

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