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In short, no.

In New York, transplanted Hong Kong hands have a couple of Chinatowns to choose from. Colombians can head out to Queens for an oblea caramel wafer and yucca bread under the elevated train tracks. Eastern Europeans longing for a borscht can ride the F train to Brighton Beach. West Africans have the Bronx, North Africans have the East Village — and even the Uighurs, the Sephardim of the Silk Road, can find home cooking out in Rego Park. But for Cambodians (and nostalgic travelers like me), a taste of home remains elusive.

Matthew Fishbane attempts to answer the eternal question about Cambodian food: why isn’t it anywhere apart from Cambodia? He answers with a good round-up of the trials and tribulations of Cambodian restauranteurs in the USA.

See also: Khmer food is good, you just suck at eating it, On the trail of Cambodian food in New York

Thanks for emailing about the plane crash near Kampot, but thankfully, I was not involved in it. I’m too cheap to fly between Sihanoukville and Siem Reap.

I made it to Kampot safely and my only risk now is a fatal crab-and-pepper overdose.

I’m on the road with Austin from RealThai, visiting all the food hotspots in Cambodia that begin with the letter “S”: Siem Reap, Snoul, Skuon and Sre Ambel. As such, things are going to be a little slow at Phnomenon for a few days. I suggest catching up on some great food bloggers from the 1800s:

• The Art of Dining; or Gastronomy and Gastronomers by Abraham Heyward (1852) – The Derby Reporter says “No Housekeeper ought to be without this book, which is adapted to every class of society, the rich, the middle classes and the poor”.
• The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1842) – Anyone famous enough to have a cheese named after them as well as having the temerity to say “a dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye.” is worth a read.

Nothing polarizes aficionados of Cambodian cuisine like fish amok. The ubiquity of this fish curry, which is typically steamed to a light mousse in a wrapper made from a banana leaf, belies a vast range of approaches to its preparation and serving.

At the core of fish amok are four elements. The first, freshwater fish, is generally the endemic snakehead fish, but other firm-fleshed freshwater creatures are often substituted; freshwater snail amok (amok chouk) also appears on local menus. In recent times ‘tofu amok’ and ‘chicken amok’ have emerged as an alternative for fish-averse tourists.

The second essential is kroeung, a pounded spice paste that contains a heavy dose of lemongrass alongside Cambodian fermented fish paste (prahok), fresh turmeric root, the ginger-like rhizome krachai, galangal, garlic and red shallots. Chili? ‘Some people use it for amok; others don’t,’ says Joannès Rivière, author of Cambodian recipe book ‘La Cuisine du Cambodge Avec les Apprentis de Sala Baï’ and executive chef of upscale Khmer restaurant Meric in Siem Reap. ‘What is sure is that it shouldn’t be fresh chili but always dried. Just soak them and chop them thinly, using a bit of palm sugar to make a paste.’ More palm sugar is also added to sweeten the curry.

Thirdly, and what most differentiates a Cambodian amok from its regional neighbors, is the addition of the herb slok ngor (the leaf of the noni tree, morinda citrifolia). The small ovoid leaf confers a subtle but distinctive bitterness to the dish.

The fourth and final must is fresh coconut milk.

So writes and photographs me(!) for today’s Wall Street Journal Asia. Sorry for no link to the rest of the article wherein I speculate at amok’s history and the reasons why it is rarely cooked at home , WSJ Asia is subscription-only.

Addendum (12 June 2007): Full fish amok article is now online at WSJ.com

Some works of travel journalism leave me thinking of Richard Nixon: bewildered; hopped up on martinis and Dilantin; not knowing which part of Indochina to nuke first. Works much like Hari Kunzru’s article from this weekend’s Observer:

Legend has it that when the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in April 1975, journalists watching from the balcony of the Foreign Correspondents Club left in such a hurry that the people who opened the boarded-up building years later found cameras on the floor, complete with undeveloped images of the fighting…A dry local joke about the FCC is that it’s the only place where the city’s many NGO workers have to grit their teeth and make conversation with so-called ‘sexpats’.

Legend has it that the FCC opened its doors in Phnom Penh for the very first time in 1993. Legend also has it that a few months ago, the New York Times made the exact same mistake and then printed the following retraction:

The Next Stop column on Feb. 11, about a new liveliness in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, misstated the role of a bar and restaurant there called the Foreign Correspondents’ Club as a hangout for Western journalists. It opened in 1993; it did not exist during the reign of the Khmer Rouge during the 1970s, a time when few Westerners were in Cambodia.

A dry local joke about The Observer newspaper is that unlike Nixon, they value factual accuracy.

See: The Observer’s A new day dawns

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

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.