Knee deep in the dead fish
Cambodia’s national fermented fish condiment, prahok, has just come into season with the annual explosion of riel fish numbers. To honour the occasion, AFP have published their insight (and a few top photos). The Ministry of Fish’s head honcho, Nao Thouk, sums up the situation with typically Khmer verve:
“Prahok is the taste of Cambodia. If there is no prahok, we are not Cambodians. Prahok is the Khmer identity,” says Nao Thouk, director of the agriculture ministry’s fisheries department.
“It is like butter or cheese for Westerners,” he adds, explaining that some 70,000 to 80,000 tonnes of prahok are produced each year between December and March, when thousands swarm to the rivers.
See: Got Fish?
I am not sure if I have tasted Prohok, but I have seen its picture on Eating Asia. I had been to Cambodia only once and tried the food; do Cambodian restaurants use Prahok in their cooking instead of fish sauce?
Nao Thouk is the man !
BTW: 70k to 80k doe snot include a lot of prahok made by granny just for family use, we estimate that that accounts for anouther 20k to 25k tonnes per annum.
Fish Me Know.
Lord Playboy
[...] Over at the always-excellent Phnomenon: Knee deep in the dead fish Cambodia’s national fermented fish condiment, prahok, has just come into season with the annual explosion of riel fish numbers. To honour the occasion, AFP have published their insight (and a few top photos). The Ministry of Fish’s head honcho, Nao Thouk, sums up the situation with typically Khmer verve: “Prahok is the taste of Cambodia. If there is no prahok, we are not Cambodians. Prahok is the Khmer identity,” says Nao Thouk, director of the agriculture ministry’s fisheries department. [...]
[...] Cambodians are world champion charcutiers. What the locals lack in quality produce, they make up for in sheer volume and world-beating determination. A Cambodian household that doesn’t dry its own fish, meat scraps or leftover rice is rarer than one that doesn’t enjoy the sublime beauty of prahok. Everybody knows how to sun-dry their own ingredients: probably the best way to spot a non-Cambodian household is to pick the one without a tray of leftovers soaking up the sunlight at the front of the house. It’s a response to the seasonal nature of Cambodian food. The frequent boom and bust cycles of local agriculture and fisheries have forced everyone to develop a taste (and huge amounts of skill) for preserving everything that they can eat. [...]