Phil – Page 8 – Phnomenon: food in Cambodia

Godspeed, you palm sap vendor

The ubiquitous feature of the Cambodian rice paddy landscape are the sugar palms which punctuate the flat landscape, skinny fists of fronds lifted in the air like antennas to heaven. They’re a versatile plant providing fruit (palm hearts and pulp from the husk), fresh sap (which can be taken straight, fermented into vinegar or wine, or cooked into palm sugar), and leaves that are woven into mats and roofing.

Vuth buys his palm sap daily from across the river and catches the ferry into Phnom Penh to vend the sap and a few blocks of palm sugar door-to-door. It is a marginal lifestyle : for his day of cycling he makes a profit of one to two dollars from the sap and a little more if he sells some sugar. He says his palm juice is the sweetest in Phnom Penh and it certainly is fresh. The naturally occurring yeasts that collect in palm sap begin fermenting the fluid within a few hours of extraction, resulting in a tart and sulphurous brew. Vuth’s had not begun to take on that unpleasant alcoholic note and was the sweetest I’ve had.

Amokalypse Now: frizz restaurant

frizz, Cambodia’s only Dutch-owned (and capitalization-free) Khmer restaurant is located on the strip of restaurants that I tend to avoid: Phnom Penh’s riverfront. I don’t avoid them because they’re at all bad or even targeted at tourists. I just seem to have fallen prey to the habit of eating inland and then heading riverwards for a digestif. As hot season approaches, so does the urge to chase the riverfront breeze. frizz is notable amongst the Tonle Sap-facing properties for both serving Khmer cuisine and for having Khmer vegetarian options on the menu.

On ordering, the waiter kindly informed me that the fish amok ($4) would take twenty minutes to be made fresh, which gave me ample time to have my sneakers appraised as dirty by the local bootlicks, buy a newspaper, be harassed by the limbless and destitute, and try on some sunglasses from the passing vendors. We engaged in a lively discussion on whether scraping the bottom of the barrel and atomising the market counts as entrepreneurialism.

The amok was topped with a huge slug of coconut cream beneath which lurked a large portion of fresh snakehead fish fillet and a chilli-heavy spice paste. None of the essential slok ngor leaf to be seen but a decent mousseline consistency. A previous amok from frizz had been steamed solid into a circular puck of curry and turned out onto the plate, thus bearing an unfortunate resemblance to an inverted can of coconut-flavoured Whiskas (‘Gives his coat that Cambodian shine!’) but this version was nowhere to be seen.

Owner Frits Mulder also runs a day-long Khmer cooking class presided over by one of his staff, which is well worth it for food tourists and expats alike because it is the only Khmer cooking class in town. I took the class over two years ago and enjoyed it, more for the opportunity to bone up on my local herb knowledge on the morning market tour rather than the cooking itself.

Location: 335 Sisowath Quay, Phnom Penh.

Amokalypse Now

Amok from Malis restaurant

If there is one item of Cambodian food that incites real passion amongst tourists to Cambodia, it is fish amok (amok trei). The mousseline fish curry steamed in a banana leaf container is one of the few Cambodian foods that consistently strikes a chord with foreigners from everywhere. As much as I try to hook my visiting compatriots on sour soups and fermented fish, nothing paves the way into Khmer cuisine as smoothly as a good amok.

I know that I’ll be pistol-whipped by a motivated official from the Ministry of Tourism for pointing this out but fish amok isn’t uniquely Cambodian. Most people in the South East Asian region caught onto cooking coconut and fish mousse in a banana leaf at some point in history. Although its origin was possibly in the Khmer empire, Thailand does a practically identical version of it named “hor mok“. Peranakan cuisine also has”otak-otak” which generally uses fish paste instead of fish chunks. I’ve heard rumour that there is a similar variety of “pepes ikan” in Indonesia (distinct from the Indonesian Peranakan edition) but have not been able to find any corroborating evidence thus far.

In the Khmer language, amok only refers to the dish, whereas in Thai ‘hor mok‘ translates as something like ‘bury wrap’ suggesting that on a linguistic basis, amok probably came from Cambodia’s immediate neighbours. A much less likely linguistic explanation for amok’s cloudy origins is to follow the trail of the word amok, whose genesis is from the 17th century Portuguese word amouco. Amouco entered into the Portuguese vernacular through their colonisation of Malaysia and is originally from the Malay amok (‘rushing in a frenzy’). Could the early Portuguese settlers or Malay traders in Cambodia carried the recipe for Peranakan otak otak with them from Malaysia resulting in the more frenzied Khmer version? It is unlikely but not outside the realm of possibility as Portugal’s culinary influence in the region resulted in starting the pan-Asian chilli addiction.

The problem with writing Cambodian food histories is that is impossible to trace recipes beyond two generations for almost all Cambodian foods. Recipes in Cambodian cuisine are orally transmitted and when a generation forgets a recipe then it disappears. Generations also modify recipes to their tastes or simply due to the dictates of the seasons or their fortunes. In this context, claiming a food is historically authentic or not is ludicrous : it might be what their grandmother cooked but beyond that lays pure conjecture. While some believe that the Khmer Rouge era destroyed much of Cambodian cuisine, I tend to take the contrary view that due to recipes being so widely distributed in society combined with the unimaginable resilience of Cambodia’s people meant that only the most marginal foods disappeared.

The resilient snakehead fish (trei ros), equally at home on dry land and in fish amok

The positive result of an orally transmitted cuisine is not only its survivability: it means that no recipe is ever canonised. There will always be subtle differences between neighbouring provinces or even neighbouring families. Fish amok is no exception with some recipes resulting in an almost-solid brick of curry or a soupier amok. Snail (chouk) is commonly used instead of fish. Some amoks are decorated Thai-style with shredded chilli and lime leaves. Some aren’t. More recently ‘tofu amok’ and ‘chicken amok’ have inveigled their way onto menus as a response to the fish-suspicious tourist.

My aim for Amokalypse Now: firstly, eat one amok each week for at least seven weeks and release a review of it on Friday, attempting to capture the widest variation of amoks. I promise to resist the use of the ‘running amok’ pun. I’ll leave that one for the professionals.

Never ending piles of prahok

The odour comes from a red washing-up bowl filled with grey sludge in which float pieces of silver fish. The smell is outdone only by an equally pungent pile of grey paste with bits of rotting fish poking out. The wet grey stuff is fish sauce, while the other is fish paste, although both seem to be called prahoc; they smell and look awful to the unaccustomed nose and eye.

Prahoc is a vital flavouring in almost everything savoury in Cambodia. So common is it that the national flag, which features the ubiquitous emblem of Angkor Wat, should be soaked in the stuff.

They’re both different grades of prahok. It describes a whole genre of fermented freshwater things. Journalist and blogger Ed Charles takes on fish in Cambodia and takes off with one of my jokes about prahok in The Australian newspaper. It’s a joy to read an article where a journalist doesn’t just eat fish amok.

There’s also a bit of a mix up between tuk trei (fish sauce, made with saltwater fish) and trei riel (“riel” fish – a few different varieties of small fish used to home-brew prahok) further down in the article, but it is understandable since there are no written resources where you could fact check such details.

See: The Australian’s A fishy pleasure

Thomas Keller does Bangkok

The closest that I’ve been to super-chef Thomas Keller was driving past French Laundry while a black helicopter was landing there. I assumed it was Mr. Keller himself because I think that he’d make a great Bond villain, executing his enemies by luring them into his Yountville lair then slowly cooking them in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag. Playing into my sad delusion is that over the weekend Keller cooked at Le Normandie in Bangkok, serving up his ‘”agnolotti” of sunchokes’ to some of Thailand’s military masterminds. Maytel and husband Chef were there:

The signature dish of Keller “oysters and pearls” was probably the highlight, although I know that if I was to put an oyster with a big dolllop of caviar and cover it all in a butter sauce people would probably applaud me too, although I probably wouldn’t be so sophomoric as to place inverted comments around it. It’s long been a sign of insufferable pompousness for people to do the whole inverted comma thing when talking, I don’t see why menus should be exempted from this judgement. But it was yummy and it did however almost inspire me to break into a modified version of Prince’s song “diamonds and pearls”.

His culinary and punctuation villainy knows no bounds. Surely, he’ll be in Cambodia next. Coverage and photos at Maytel

Bring the noise

While newspaper Cambodia Daily’s coverage of the local food scene over the last two years has amounted to the occasional mention of a stout-drinking monkey or the carnivorous habits of Ratanakiri’s recent ‘jungle woman‘, today they’ve atoned and inserted a 12-page full-colour wining and dining supplement packed full of original content. The coverage is as diverse as Cambodia’s dining scene: fresh mangoes, fish amok, the desserts from Raffles, local sommeliers and winery, ribs in Battambang, Swedish in Sihanoukville, vegetarian faux-meats, akao (with comment from ‘pastry chef’ Joannes Riviere), and an interview with me about Phnomenon. Thanks to Suzy Khimm for the article (also read her latest piece over at Slate), Nathan Horton for the photo of me grinning deliriously into my 1500 riel bowl of num banchok from Psar Orussei.

I would provide a link to the supplement for the 95% of my readers who don’t have access to the Cambodia Daily but the Daily hasn’t quite caught onto Internet publishing yet.

There’s also an interview with me over at Jaunted today, where I was asked to recommend five things not to do in Phnom Penh and supply alternatives. I recommend against pilseners, The Killing Fields, only eating amok, The Lake, and expecting your motodop to know his way around Phnom Penh.

Only one person has commented on my obvious pretensions so far which is well below average whenever I use the words ‘poststructuralist’ or ‘Klang Stout’. Month one of New Year’s resolution is now on track.

Where do recalled products go? Cambodia

Just a word of warning for American peanut butter fiends via the Cambodian Parents Network: Lucky Supermarket in Phnom Penh is currently selling a batch of Peter Pan brand peanut butter that was recalled in the US of A due to its salmonella content rather than being a sickly sweet approximation of real peanut butter. According to the US FDA:

ConAgra is recalling all Peter Pan peanut butter and all Great Value peanut butter beginning with product code 2111 that already was distributed. The company also is destroying all affected products in its possession. The company has stopped production and is working to identify the cause of the contamination. ConAgra has advised consumers to destroy all Peter Pan peanut butter and any Great Value peanut butter beginning with product code 2111.

The recall also features the fantastic line:

‘Tennessee’ is a type of Salmonella.

My advice: eat Cambodian. There’s a local brand of peanut butter which isn’t too bad (and I’d plug it if I could recall its name). If your kids miss the saccharine evil of Peter Pan, just add a teaspoon of MSG and a slug of corn syrup to the local brand. To get a full refund for your peanut butter, ConAgra says:

If you have this product, please discard it, but save the Peter Pan Peanut Butter lid or label beginning with product code 2111 imprinted on it.

For a full refund, please mail the Peter Pan Peanut Butter product lid or label beginning with product code 2111 imprinted on it along with your name and mailing address to the local distributor in your geographic region. The complete list of distributors by country can be found below.

No Cambodian distributor is named but my guess is send it to:

Vietnam
Bao Quang Production and Trading Co., Ltd.
Room No. 503, Bldg. No. 4
Lang Ha Badinh Dist.
Hanoi, Vietnam
84-4-7723624-25-26

Addendum (22 March 2007): The Cambodian brand is “Healthland Natural Peanut Butter” and is found at most Phnom Penh supermarkets. Cheers to DAS, PB. Lucky Supermarket has since pulled the products from its shelves.

Drinking coffee, Phnom Penh-style

Phnom Penhois love their coffee. I don’t love Phnom Penhois coffee but we have reached a mutually agreeable dÃ©tente. I sneak off to get my Illy espresso to assuage my crema fixation at a frankly ludicrous price or brew my own at home with my emergency macchinetta, and don’t unduly hassle the locals. My tastes are for thick, rich and Italian thanks to my inherited Melburnian coffee fetishism. While the local coffee is both eminently drinkable and well caffeinated, it isn’t for what I pine. It is an issue of process rather than raw ingredient.

The Cambodian method could not be simpler. Boiled water is poured into a fine cloth sock containing a few hundred grams of finely ground beans, and the water and resulting coffee percolate into the purpose-made ceramic vessel below. From this master brew, there are four variations: hot or iced, with sweetened condensed/tinned milk or without. There is a marked preference for iced coffee with either sweetened condensed milk and/or for drinkers to add four to five teaspoons of sugar. This oversweetening is possibly to offset the general bitterness of the dark-roasted local beans and to cater to the indigenous preference for maximising calories per dollar.

Coffee brewed in the local manner can be found anywhere that you see one of those brown coffeepots and a string of the coffee socks hanging out to dry by their wire handle. Most small roadside breakfast vendors brew their own and larger chains such as T&Coffee World or the execrable Lucky 7 cater to Phnom Penh’s more affluent crowd. The above coffee was from the corner of st.432 and 155, who also roast Cambodian coffee beans, and was notable for the degree of smoke flavour that their personal roasting style added to the brew. Not a trace of pork flavour.

Pork and Rice: The national breakfast.

There are four types of Cambodian breakfast: pork and rice (bai sach chrouk); noodles (mee cha) or noodle soup (khtieau); rice porridge (bobor); and the improvised foods of those who are starving and eat whatever they or the World Food Programme can unearth. At a rough guess, these groups equally split the population (with an outcast minority such as me who tend to only eat breakfast on weekends and therefore try to make it as decadent and calorific as humanly possible. In the view of most Cambodians, my diet is not so much unbalanced as it is unhinged; and thus somewhere outside orthodox classification).

The standard Cambodian pork and rice set is as follows: any boneless cut of pork, thinly sliced and barbecued on a wire grill over warm coals then served with a hefty plate of broken (or just cheap) rice. The pork is sometimes marinated in garlic and oil, but more often than not, is just cooked slowly over the fire to soak up the fat-induced smoke. The side is invariably pickles, most commonly cucumber. The below pickles were a piquant mix of fresh ginger, cucumber with still a hint of crispness and paper-thin slices of daikon radish.

The set will include a bowl of thin chicken stock from the noodle soup master stock, topped with spring onions, and a dipping bowl of sweet chilli sauce (tuk mteis). The method of eating the stock is to either eat it uncut or take a small spoonful of rice and then top up your spoon with a little stock. The above chilli was blindingly hot which is a real rarity, because the sweetness tends to outweigh the capsaicin.

If cutlery is not already present on the table, then it will arrive in cup full of steaming and sterilising water (orange and plastic, above) and the correct etiquette is to wipe down your knife and fork with a provided napkin or toilet paper, disposing of the paper on the floor or into a provided tableside bin. Do not under any circumstance drink the water in the sterilising cup.

The eateries are at their busiest from 6:00am until 8:00am, as most locals have seemingly been up since sunrise and need a huge carb-and-lard boost to get them through to the interminable hours until the midday meal. When busy, all tables are considered communal. It is perfectly acceptable to intrude on anybody’s table and engage them in your wittiest repartee. My Khmer wit is extraordinarily limited, although everyone gets a laugh out of how I can’t properly pronounce the word for ‘glass’. Unlike Vietnam or Thailand where small breakfast vendors often lack tables, a Cambodian pork and rice vendor without seating and a rudimentary bench is an exception. Where the tables are not built from the thin metal, they are covered with a garish vinyl tablecloth which is either geometrically patterned or provided as an advertisement from a large soup or monosodium glutamate manufacturer.

By 9:00am, breakfast will be over. Small pork and rice joints will disappear entirely to be replaced by lunchtime soup, fish and rice vendors. Brunch is not an option.

Location: Pictured pork is from my coffee roasting friends at the corner of Street 432 and 155, but there is a pork-charring crew on practically every Phnom Penh side street in the mornings. The best guide to picking a great bai sach chrouk vendor is finding one where the barbecue is still smoking and pork is served directly from the grill to your plate. Most vendors buy their pork daily (as a cashflow issue rather than not having proper storage) and so freshness is guaranteed.
Continue reading Pork and Rice: The national breakfast.

It’s grim up north

Its undoubtedly the liveliest and most popular Korean restaurant in town. Packed for lunch and dinner, the Pyongyang Restaurant is famous not only for its cold noodles and barbecue served with kim chi, but also for its talented wait staff, which when not serving are dancing to traditional Korean tunes played on violins and electric piano.

But the Pyongyang Restaurant in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh is no ordinary Korean eatery. For one, it’s owned and run by the North Korean government, a capitalist enterprise that sends its profits directly to state coffers in Pyongyang.

Asia Times’ Bertil Lintner covers the geopolitical implications of Phnom Penh’s weirdest food attraction: the North Korean-owned and run Pyongyang Restaurant. This seems to be the only Cambodian eatery that plays the food-as-propaganda angle, and does a roaring trade attracting South Koreans into its razor-wired compound. Not much mention of the food but plenty of juicy political tidbits to make it worthwhile.

See: Asia Times’ Dining with the Dear Leader