Phnomenon: food in Cambodia

Over the border in Vietnam, mam is used as a catch-all fermented aquatic animal word: nuoc mam is fish sauce; mam tom is shrimp paste; bun mam is purported to be the best noodle soup in Saigon.
On my Cambodian side of the border, mam is mam. It refers to the above salted, fermented […]

Cambodian street food acts as an indicator of the global and historical tensions on modern Khmer culture. The pull between different cultural and historical influences is literally played out in the street food. It isn’t uncommon to see food that was transported to Cambodia about a millennium ago served next to food that first arrived […]

Phnom Penh is blessed with a handful of good secondhand bookstores which have managed to allay my initial fear in Phnom Penh that I would run out of anything worthwhile to read. Chea Sopheap, Cambodia’s only nuclear physicist fanboy and owner of Bohr’s Books gets profiled in today’s Telegraph (UK)
“I started from zero. I left […]

When you first step foot into a Cambodian market, the first thing you’ll notice is the smell. Within that complex and fertile aroma, there is always the warm earthy scent of dried salted fish. In the markets, the dried fish is completely inescapable, and in Cambodian food, even more so. While most dishes use it […]

For the five people in Japan reading this, Shin at Eline Saglik has been translating a few of the Cambodian recipes from Khmer Krom Recipes into Japanese. Judging from the photos, samlor machu sach moan can be easily replicated in your average Japanese kitchen. The recipe does however make the slightly bizarre suggestion that vinegar […]

For those of you unfamiliar with the pantheon of Australian beer, Australia has a similarly named Crown Lager. For countless years, it masqueraded as a premium lager, thinly disguised behind its smug golden foil cap and flowery font. I still harbour the lurking suspicion that it is actually Foster’s Lager in a fancy […]

The fruitless pursuit of Cambodian food in New York continues unabated. Sonja from Brooklyn Ramblings goes hunting:
I must have looked lost, as I was soon greeted with “hey guy - whatcha lookin’ for?” When I said Cambodian, my good samaritan just looked bewildered. But then I started getting some interesting leads. First I stopped in […]

One of the worse fates that I’ll be consigning to this website is that I will never be able to review all of the multitudinous variations of Cambodian rice flour desserts. When you eat one type, four new ones return to take its place. It’s like battling a saccharine Hydra made from pudding.
At the moment, […]

It’s amazing what a few hundred years of invasion and counter-invasion will do to a relationship with your immediate regional neighbours. At best, Cambodia’s relationship with Vietnam is rocky. Indeed, there is a huge amount of debate as to whether the Khmer language word for the Vietnamese – yuon – actually constitutes a racial slur. […]

Unlike most people, I have a high tolerance for eating things that I cannot identify taxonomically. Whenever I pass somebody on a roadside shucking something that looks edible, I’ll give it a go. Often it’s not edible. Often it’s not even supposed to be food.
This roadside vendor was undergoing the arduous process of cracking […]