My city, St. Paul, MN has the largest Hmong population in the United States. The public elementary school at the end of my city block, at one time, was virtually 100% Hmong. Before the Hmong fled SE Asia, they were primarily a rural people and there was, for the most part, no documented written cuisine. Recipes were passed word of mouth, generation to generation, and by many standards, quite primitive.
I ate lunch in the mid 1980s at the first Hmong restaurant in the U.S. on University Avenue in St. Paul's "frogtown" neighborhood. I vividly remember walking into the restaurant to discover I was the only non-Hmong person there and there were no women dining there. I was escorted to a table by a beautiful late teen girl. She obviously had come to the States as a small child because she had no accent. "We rarely ever see anyone who isn't Hmong in here. There aren't any menus, people just tell us what they want to eat and my mom cooks it." I told her just to bring the most popular dish that they had. A few minutes after I sat down, she brought several small bowls of chopped vegetables, some I didn't recognize, some different small cups of sauces, and a large bowl of a fish soup, with large chunks of fish, cabbage, onion, and radish. I watched how others were adding vegetables and sauces to their fish bowl. There were no noodles.
Upon first taste, I knew that the various sauces were there for a reason; the soup was not really a soup. It was just the hot water that was used to cook the fish. I dipped a finger in each of the sauces, so I knew what it was. Then, slowly, I added small amounts of the sauces until I had a soup that to my taste was palatable. I asked my server for an empty bowl. In that bowl I removed the skin and bone from the chunks of fish and put the edible flesh into the soup bowl.
At that point, when I was about to chow down, a man from another table came over and asked if he could taste what I had made. I said, yes, and he called to my server to bring him a spoon. He took a spoonful with a chunk of fish and smiled, "Good." My server came over a bit later and said that was her father. "He wants to know if you are a chef. What you made he said is delicious."