Sorry about the writing hiatus, I escaped Phnom Penh for a few days over Pchum Benh: the Buddhist religious holiday wherein you offer food at seven temples to sate the bloodlust of your undead relatives, lest they return to wreak unholy vengeance upon the living. Or something along those lines. I managed to fit in some impressive ruin visiting (pictured above/below) and eating some equally impressive food.
Normal service will resume soon, with a bit of non-Phnom Penh content.
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Last week my inamorata was away for a few days and so I did what any red-blooded man in Phnom Penh does when their significant other is out of town: I learnt some more Cascading Style Sheets. What this means for you: Phnomenon now looks like my original design. Features include:
For all of you budding geography freaks, the Siem Reap area has been updated on Google Maps. Sadly, no Battambang yet. Wikimapia have also updated their Cambodian offering for Phnom Penh, with useful markers like the Office of Mr Hoanh Sa and the “Sun Family” home.
The map link below sticks a pin in Angkor Wat.
Previously on Phnomenon: Phnom Penh Food Map
Sun-drying fish near Psar Chas, Phnom Penh.
My favourite moments when discussing food with Cambodians come when I speak passionately about some particular foreign food and they look at me like I’ve just described to them the correct manner by which to skin and eat a human baby. For some reason, I often receive this blank stare of boundless horror when I try to describe muesli as a vaguely pleasurable breakfast experience. Possibly because at some unspecified time, Cambodians encountered Grape-Nuts.
Over the weekend, a friend was in town for a reciprocal visit from Laos and we did a run to Lucky Supermarket for a selection of processed Western goods unavailable in the Land of A Million Elephants. While I was perusing the specials bin, I spied a packet of Grape-Nuts. They sounded vaguely like an insult that you would throw around the playground as a child, so we deduced that they must be a good thing. They were also half the price of any other imported breakfast cereal available in Cambodge.
Kraft says: “One of the first ready-to-eat cereal products ever made available to the public, Grape-Nuts was first introduced in 1897. Made of wheat and malted barley, Grape-Nuts was so named because its inventor, Charles William Post, said that grape sugar was formed during the baking process and described the cereal as having a nutty flavor.”
I say: After completing the baking process, I would have bestowed the name Bran-Gravel on the product. The only positive that comes from this product is that it effectively sharpens your teeth as you eat it, or at least, polishes the pieces of teeth that have snapped off as you fruitlessly gnaw away.
My friend from Lao PDR says: “I concur, Grape Nuts suck ass”
Grape-Nuts are currently on sale at Lucky for US$1.90. Unleash the cereal wrath upon Phnom Penh at your peril.
I’ve tagged as many of the articles as I can with latitudes and longitudes for the Food Map: Phnom Penh as well as adding maps for the categories, just in case you’d like to narrow things down. It really puts into sharp perspective how little of this town I have covered in the past six months.
Within the last two days, Google updated their satellite map of Phnom Penh. While I have so far resisted the urge to take a look at the helicopter pad in Hun Sen’s backyard, I’m not going to miss the opportunity to start mapping out all of the locations of where I fill my belly in Asia’s least-hyped food destination.
I present to you the Food Map: Phnom Penh.
The contents are a little anorexic for a food map, but I’ll try and add most of my back catalogue to it by the weekend. Enjoy.
I’m a bit of a fan of Lomo photography and I have just discovered that it is not beyond my means to emulate a crappy Russian camera with Photoshop. To keep within the Soviet theme, the pictured cyprinids are from the occasionally grim local market next door to the Russian Market in Phnom Penh.
Proud whaling nation Cambodia has just joined the International Whaling Commission which is a slight surprise given that my belief was that cetaceans in Cambodia were strictly bycatch. Dolphin amok coming to a restaurant near you. I’ll be running a pool as to which minister will become Whale Commissioner in the comments.
See: Whaling coverage from The Guardian’s Commentisfree.
“You take the chicken, and you pluck the chicken while it’s still alive, and you baste the skin with a mixture of soya, wheat germ and dripping, I think it was. And apparently this makes it look like the skin’s been roasted. You then put the head of this live chicken under its tummy and rock it to sleep. Then you get two other chickens and you roast them. And you bring these three chickens out on a tray to the table. You start carving one of the roasted chickens. And. . .the one that is still alive but sleeping goes sort of ‘Wha!’ — head pops up — and it runs off down the table…
And that’s Part 1. Then you take this poor chicken, and you kill it, and you stuff its neck with a mixture of quicksilver, which is mercury, and sulfur, and then stitch it up. And apparently — obviously I haven’t tried this at home, or at work — the expanding air in the neck cavity as you roast causes the mercury and the sulfur to react and somehow creates a clucking noise.”
Sweet Zombie Jesus.
The New York Times delivers us an interview with Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck, speaking of 14th Century French food. Yes, completely unrelated to Cambodian food but so entirely compelling. Not to mention that it would take balls of solid steel to carve a chicken full of boiling quicksilver at the table.
