Reminiscences on bowls of soups, on touchstone broths, the bedrock basics on which societies feed, are only natural this time of year.

The weather turns harsh, the chill of winter penetrates, and it is to soups and stews and comforting ritual meals we turn with gratitude.

There is something about cold weather that leads to reflective searchings back through memory and time, to dishes sprung from the farthest reaches of childhood, to nursery foods, odd, peculiar little dishes in which one crumbled crackers in warm milk or probed bread fingers into a soft-boiled egg.

We yearn for earnest, amiable, cozy foods that promote an extraordinary sense of well-being and search out simple foods that feed the body and the soul, that have triumphed and endured from the past.

"I need some congee or a bowl of pho," said a Vietnamese friend recently, "need it with all my heart." If you have not eaten a good bowl of rice congee or Vietnamese noodle soup recently, head to the Eden Shopping Center in Falls Church, where Big Wong will feed you the most humble of stewed-rice soups topped with a multitude of meats, and Pho Hoa, the bright-white, neat-as-a-pin noodle shop, will offer you a filling bowl of pho, the Vietnamese national breakfast, a study in triumphant endurance.

How fundamental is soup, whether thin or thick, lean or fat. Traditional soups, Eastern or Western, are built upon the easiest of bases, water and the thickening of water with the addition of gelatinous animal carcasses rendered into luxurious stock.

Thickened further with starch or egg drops, pasta or potatoes, these soups are the kinds most people find of comfort. Easily digestible, they fill the stomachs of those who can afford little else, and they fall into the ranks of those restorative foods called analeptics.

Analeptics include all those foods or substances that are considered to be restoratives, strength promoters, comforting builders of health in times of convalescence, whether from a serious illness, a simple cold, indigestion or a hangover.

The art and preparation of the analeptic cure is not much practiced in these days of quick chemical reparation, but not so long ago, cookbooks were filled with sections on "Invalid Cookery" (often subtitled "Food for the Poor").

Think analeptic national soups -- the blood-red borscht of Russia, the potato gruel of Ireland, the West African "soup" of potato greens thickened with rice. Think old English milk soup with toasted bread boiled in spiced milk with an egg yolk added at the end, and Jewish-style chicken soup.

Think congee, a kind of Oriental equivalent of porridge (called okayu in Japan), a loose mixture of starchy short-grained rice simmered very slowly for one hour in salted water.

If you are poor, it fills the stomach of necessity. If you are rich, it plays at being medicine.

After many banquets, say the Chinese, then you have comforting congee with salty pickles -- one mouthful of plain congee, one little mouthful of salt pickle, just like Western tea and toast to settle the stomach. If there is sickness, some chicken goes into the congee, but any good Chinese cook will tell you there should be no fat in analeptic food, as it sits badly on the stomach.

At Big Wong, you can have congee with: chopped beef; liver; pork and thousand-year egg; chicken and mushroom; pork meat; shredded duck; duck blood; fish filet; baby shrimp. Shredded chicken or duck you'll like the most, though congee itself you may find an acquired taste. Thick, white, starchy, plain, with only the shredded meat to relieve the consistency, it will make you want to call for sliced scallions, the salt of soy sauce for embellishment. A big bowl will cost $3.75.

You will like even more the noodle soups at Pho Hoa. Pho means "your own bowl," and, unlike other Oriental meals where everything is shared, this is a solitary dish, complete within itself, comforting in its exclusivity.

Pho Hoa's menu cover, playing to Western sensibilities has it right of course: "The Health Conscious Choice!" it trumpets. And playing to Vietnamese sensibilities, it notes the "cravings" both children and adults have for pho.

Usually served for breakfast, pho consists of a mass of pale white rice noodles immersed in a rich beef broth. Splashed with hot chili sauce, it is meant as a fortifying, mind-clearing morning tonic, though noodle shops sell the inexpensive dish all day.

At the side of the soup is a dish heaped with bean sprouts, gentle mint, slices of lime and hot-hot pepper. You can order up a beginner's topping of eye of round steak, well-done brisket or meat balls.

Or you can move to more sophisticated combinations of eye of round and fat brisket, well-done flank and tripe, which allow the slick of tasty fat, a most desirable sensation. Adventurers are offered tripe and soft tendon, prized for their gelatinous, chewy textures.

But beyond the simple clarity of the broth, the filling blandness of the noodles, the selective, meager use of meat slightly cooked by the boiling broth to a perfect "medium" by the time it reaches the table, is the actual ritual of eating pho, for you must prepare your own version of the soup at table. When we involve ourselves, if only symbolically, in the task of preparation as well as the final act of eating, pho, like all memorable foods, comforts by its very ritual involvement.

You tuck a napkin over the front of your dress or shirt so the long slaps of noodles cannot spray you. You select, from the array on the table, the condiments you will use to flavor your bowl. Thick hoisin sauce, plummy and sweet in its plastic container, is squirted on like ketchup by some diners. Red-hot chili sauce is pressed out on every bite by others. If you are a very proper Vietnamese, you mix a small bowl of sauces on the side and include a good dose of the fish sauce that looks to be soy sauce.

Into the broth you load part of the bean sprouts and the mint sprigs, squeeze juices from the lime. You hold chopsticks in your right hand, soup spoon in your left, then plunge the chop sticks down into the soup and lift the noodles over the sprouts and greens to help them briefly blanch.

Using the chopsticks, you either center a neat mouthful in the spoon, from which you eat the noodles, or you eat the noodles directly from the chopsticks, with the spoon held under to keep the noodles from falling back in the broth and splashing in the process.

Bits of sliced meats are touched briefly to a side dish of sauce and eaten separately. So delicate is this feast, though one should slurp the noodles, draw them up noisily so that air cools them on their passage to the mouth.

And there you have it. Nothing could be simpler. A large bowl costs $4.35. A small bowl, $3.95, could stretch to two meals for me, or perhaps one could beg a child's bowl ($2.7S) and find it enough another time.

For dessert, the homemade puddings of jelly and tapioca, white beans and red beans may be strange to Western tastes, but the ca phe sua, coffee with condensed milk, should be attempted, if only to partake in another ritual. It is deep and intense, and in the bottom of the coffee cup is sweetened condensed milk. you spoon it up to mix it with the plain black coffee.

A Thermos of hot water is set on table, and you pour in a bit to dilute the overwhelming sweetness of the nearly caramelized milk. It is strange and otherworldly stuff, but you wind up drinking it all.

Perhaps some day there will be a multitude of noodle shops along our streets as there are in Asia. It's anybody's guess what our new national soup might become as our country grows more polyglot. Simple pho has as good a chance as any.