Dispelling Cambodian Cuisine Myths — It’s Not ‘Mild Thai’! (Long Read)
Posted: Thu Nov 07, 2019 1:42 pm
by Lara Dunston
Most visitors to Cambodia’s Siem Reap that we meet know little or nothing about Cambodian food and what they think they know is often incorrect.
Journos on junkets learn what they know from hotel cooking school instructors — and they don’t always get it right either. At a recent cooking class that Terence observed at a newish five-star Siem Reap resort, the young instructor was guilty of all sorts of Khmer cooking crimes, including adding oyster sauce to a red curry.
Yet we learn in The Customs of Cambodia, an account of “Angkor at the height of its splendour”, by Chinese emissary Zhou Daguan, written during his year here from 1296–7, that pepper was grown and used in cooking. “It grows twisted round the stems of the rattan, fastening on like a hop vine. Pepper that is fresh and blue-green has the most savour,” he wrote.
Time for a history lesson: the Funan Kingdom, the first Khmer state, is Southeast Asia’s oldest empire. Culturally influenced by India, it rose to prominence in the first century AD. Funan’s cosmopolitan capital Oc-eo, south of Cambodia’s current capital Phnom Penh, was already an established international trading port between India and China when sailors and merchants arrived from the West, from Greece, the Roman Orient and Persia. Archaeologists have unearthed everything from Greco-Roman jewellery to Persian coins there.
But can we blame people for thinking that Cambodian cuisine is a mild for of Thai if they’ve only eaten Cambodian food at tourist restaurants around Pub Street, where chefs have diluted the more challenging flavours – the bitter, sour, salty, pungent notes that Cambodians love so much – so they don’t get fired for all those uneaten dishes returned to the kitchen. It’s not the diner’s fault if the chef has adjusted his Cambodian food so that it tastes more Thai, because he thinks that’s what they want.
We know from Chinese records that there was an abundance of everything and that it was traded, cooked and eaten: fruit, vegetables, spices, herbs, roots, leaves, and flowers; fish, seafood, sea turtles, and crocodiles from the lake and ocean; cattle, chickens, ducks, geese, swine, and sheep. There were indigenous noodles as well as rice, and an array of fermented wines and spirits. The scenes depicted in the temple bas reliefs support this.
That means it’s perfectly acceptable to have a sour soup, a pungent relish, and bitter greens. In fact, sour, pungent and bitter tend to be preferred by most Cambodians. Although increasingly everything is becoming a little sweeter, due to the changing tastes of the younger generation, something being felt right across Southeast Asia.
full https://grantourismotravels.com/dispell ... ine-myths/
