Khmer Eats

     Cambodian cuisine is a minefield.  There are high notes, which are consistently good.  Beef lok-lak is a consistently tasty dish, glazed in something like Cambodian sweet-and-sour sauce, topped with a fried egg (runny yolk, which I prefer), and seasoned with lime juice and the culinary treasure that is Kampot pepper.  Nom pachok is a hearty bowl of soup that sits at the intersection of pad Thai and the American chicken noodle classic.  The noodles are homemade in the best instances, accompanied by a rich broth, pork or chicken seasoned with just a bit of curry, sweet basil, and a very few other spices that help to complement the homemade simplicity of the dish.  Khmer barbecue is also excellent, especially the pork ribs.  But for every great dish, there are a dozen dishes that look like it, but are either surprisingly different, or just plain terrible.  The result is that every foray into unknown dinner territory is full of trepidation, with one nervously sampling each dish that comes along, uncomfortably mindful that it could be an unknown horror lying in wait.

     I learned this the hard way.  While we were in Siem Reap for trial, some of the Khmer staff took us out to lunch with them.  It was a wonderful opportunity to get to know some of the people I work with in a casual, friendly environment, and I am both humbled and thrilled to have been welcomed into their lives that way.  Having said that, lunch was an object lesson in all the reasons not to be too adventurous with one’s food.  After being seated at a long wooden table in a little grass-roofed hut, we were served a selection of drinks which included the odd-tasting juices of a dozen unusual fruits and vegetables, including a black jelly-juice made of some sort of grass.  The main appetizer was boiled peanuts, a favorite in my Southern homeland, but they were accompanied by durian.  Durian is a fruit that has become notorious among Western travelers to Southeast Asia.  One of my coworkers perfectly summed up the experience of this mushy, fibrous fruit that looks like a pineapple and smells strongly of rotting garbage by saying, “When my people eat durian, it is a treat, but when your people eat durian, it is a punishment.”  The first thing I discovered that day was that durian tastes exactly like it smells.  Things continued along that vein for the next two hours.  Along the way, I burned a red stripe across my forehead when I wiped it with the back of my hand after squeezing an incredibly hot pepper.  I discovered that solid blocks of congealed blood are considered a good way to season fish soup in Cambodia.  I had some tasty mango salad and some simple, well-steamed rice.  I was stabbed by countless bits of bone and sharp wooden twigs out of my mouth before being told that, in Cambodia, you often have to test each mouthful with your tongue and find the shards that need to be pulled out before chewing.  At one point, I found myself wondering what part of a chicken I was gnawing on when I realized I had a vertebrae in my mouth.  As it turns out, I really like chicken necks.  Then, the beer arrived and the men began pouring cheap high-gravity beer over large chunks of ice, and not taking “no” for an answer.  Several beers, a heaping helping of spicy meat salad, a few swallowed fish bones, a generous dollop of fermented fish paste, a mountain of rice, and two chicken necks later, someone finally got around to teaching me the Khmer word for “enough”: “ban-hai.”  One of our dinner companions felt the need to illustrate this language lesson by tying a white napkin around a chopstick and placing it in an empty beer can in a passable imitation of a surrender flag.  This visual aid elicited raucous laughter from around the table, which of course resulted in more anchor beer.  So much for ban-hai. 

   

     Of course, not all surprises are bad, like the surprising depth of Kampot pepper or the pleasant saltiness of fermented fish paste.  Fried rice is a traditional breakfast food, and once you get used to it, it isn’t half bad.  When you make coffee triple strength, pitch black, and sludgy, it becomes rather pleasant if mixed with an equal portion of condensed milk and then drowned in ice.  Crickets, ants, and tarantulas are all much better and more fun to eat than you imagine.  I never brought myself to try the half-formed duck fetus that is considered a delicacy, but I’m told it’s also quite good.  Still, even the good bits are laden with surprises, so my final word on Cambodian cuisine is caveat essetor: let the eater beware.