The New Zealand Herald
Tuesday Oct 30, 2012
View from high above Siem Reap. Photo / Getty Images
High on the roof of Le Tigre de Papier Restaurant I could be in Paris.
From here the city of Siem Reap with its tiled roof-tops reminds me that
until 1953 Cambodia was under French colonial rule. And though the
French might not have done the Cambodians much good in terms of
self-rule and infrastructure, the abiding architecture and layout of
this graceful river city has that unmistakable French feel.
And the food is fabulous. So here we are at one of the best of Siem
Reap's cooking schools (according to Diana, our guide) to learn how to
make the Cambodian dishes we've learned to love. Our fine-boned,
beautiful teacher, Navin, leads us up the stairs and into a cool airy
space.
It's fitted with gas hobs and hung with outsized pots and pans. Two
sides of the room have no walls, meaning the breeze flows through to
keep us cool. Everything is spotless. In the centre preparation table
there's a large jug of filtered iced water for us to drink and an enamel
basin containing more water and floating slices of lemon. "To wash your
hands," she says.
"And these," unfolding a pile of fresh-laundered pink linen, "are your hats and aprons."
But our first task is to go to the Old Siem Reap Market and select the
food we're about to cook. Although I've already tried haggling for silk
scarves, toys and embroidered purses, this visit is more exciting. More
than half the spices and vegetables are totally new to me. The stench of
blood and innards mixed with spices makes us gag as Navin leads us past
glistening flat river fish, rough-cut yellow-skinned chooks and sinewy
meat. There's not much fat on anything.
The fruit and vegetables are just as exotic. Piles of durian, green
mangoes, paw paw and green and brown coconuts, plus twisted aromatic
roots that Navin says are expensive, lie alongside stacks of long, thin
green beans. The banks of spices including chillis of every shape,
colour and size and tiny limes that flavour most meals, are a rainbow
against the mounds of fresh, peppery-tasting Cambodian basil and
coriander.
Navin selects fish, onions, kaffir lime leaves and a chunk of gnarled
root. It's called galangal and apparently tastes like ginger, but with a
spicy edge that scents most Cambodian dishes. Once you recognise it you
can taste it in everything.
Back at the rooftop cook school it's on with the chef hats and aprons
and down to work. I'm slicing cabbage, shallots, lime leaves and carrots
for our shrimp wraps. Despite years of cooking I'm clumsy and slow
alongside the deft Navin. Diana gets to make the palm sugar, lime and
chilli dressing.
Like all women, we chat as we cook. Navin is 25. She has a 5-month-old
baby back home, being looked after by her family. She's still
breastfeeding. She wakes her daughter before she leaves for work at
6.30am and feeds her again when she gets home around 6pm. It's a 12-hour
work day, most of it on her feet, with 10 minutes off for lunch. The
pay is US$20 ($24) a week.
Marriage breakup is common in Cambodia where sex before marriage is
frowned upon and the married couple traditionally live with the bride's
parents. Young husbands (referred to as "party boys") often buck a
system that nails them down too early and run away, leaving their wives
with two or three children, and condemned to a life of drudgery.
There are many like Navin: slender, sweet-faced young women who work
10-12 hour days as cleaners, waiters and chefs, then go home to a baby
waiting for its night feed. And unbelievably, according to the girls I
meet, they're considered over the hill after 30, by Cambodian men.
Although Navin grumbles a bit, she laughs much more. Soon she and Diana,
who speaks reasonably fluent Khmer, are giggling away as I pound the
spices with an outsized pestle and mortar.
Diana runs Bloom, a "social enterprise" organisation that attempts to
help women out of poverty by employing them to make and sell stylish
handbags from recycled rice sacks and silk off-cuts. Though the average
wage is officially US$40-60 for a 48-hour week, Bloom's Cambodian
workers get US$70 for 40 hours plus 28 days holiday a year. "Even so,"
says Diana, "it's taken a while for the Cambodian team to understand how
to work according to international standards. But after four years,
they're getting there."
She is talking about work ethics most New Zealanders take for granted
such as keeping the door open so that customers know the shop is open,
turning up for work on time, not raiding the till or cheating the boss.
The restaurant business, including the growing cook-school trade, is
already a sizeable source of work and revenue in entrepreneurial Siem
Reap. Five years ago, says Diana, there were half a dozen restaurants in
the Old Town. Now there are hundreds, and several of them offer cooking
schools too. You can learn practically anything here. I also tried
pottery classes and have a respectable, though lumpy, green bowl and
beaker (which were allowed back to New Zealand in their woven leaf box)
to prove it.
Pounding spices with dried fish and fish pastes is a cornerstone of
Khmer cooking. By halfway through our class, I'm having a go at lemon
grass, saffron, galangal, lime leaves and rind, turmeric and something
they call amomum zingiber (but which Google suggests is ginger) in a
large pestle and mortar.
It's for the dish "fish amok"
and needs a huge thumping to get it smooth enough for Navin, who kindly
moves me on to slicing a couple of bell peppers while she grinds it
into submission.
Next the spice paste is flopped into the wok with coconut cream and
browned quickly before adding the sliced mud fish, salt, fish sauce,
more coconut milk and sugar.
Meanwhile we're learning how to make little serving baskets out of
banana leaves. As soon as the amok is finished it's spooned into these,
topped with lime leaves and sliced bell peppers.
Food is a great solace for Cambodians. Although the culture was almost
wiped out by the devastating Pol Pot regime that systematically worked,
starved and tortured millions of people to death, traditional food and
the art of cooking lives on.
It also adapts with the times. Navin's piece de resistance is sticky
rice dessert. I won't go into details, save saying that the recipe
involves rice, coconut milk, plenty of tinned sweetened condensed milk,
more sugar and plenty of salt. And it is absolutely fabulous.
By 3pm our lesson is over, the meal prepared. We take off our hats and
aprons and follow Navin downstairs to the heat and clamour of Tigre de
Papier's ground floor restaurant, where Diana's husband, Alan, is
hungrily waiting.
We can read it on his face. Everything we've prepared - shrimp wraps,
fish amok, sticky rice - is absolutely delicious. And the whole thing,
including three hours of tuition and the market visit, plus lunch, cost
US$20 a head.
Click here to see the recipe for the Fish Amok created in Carroll's cooking class.
CHECKLIST
Getting there: Cathay Pacific's sister airline Dragonair offers daily flights between Hong Kong and Phnom Penh. Cathay Pacific offers special fares from New Zealand to Phnom Penh.
Getting around: Tuk-tuks are the best way to travel in Siem Reap and surrounds.
* Carroll du Chateau travelled to Siem Reap with help from Cathay Pacific.
By Carroll du Chateau Email Carroll
No comments:
Post a Comment