BookReview

Book review
The Asian Wall Street Journal
Food for Thought Robert Templer CAMBODIAN CUISINE'S UNLIKELY THAI ALLY In an Effort to Keep Grilled Frogs Alive, One Woman Rewrote the Recipe Book from Scratch It all began with a stuffed frog. Nusara Thaitawat, a young journalist with the Bangkok Post, was in Phnom Penh in the early 1990s to cover the start of the peace process when she tasted grilled frogs stuffed with pork accompanied by a salad made from m'kakk, a small amber-colored fruit the size of a mango. Despite being made with ingredients that were all available in her native Thailand, the dishes were a revelation of subtle, balanced flavors.
	"I was amazed that ingredients that were so familiar could at the same time be so exotic," she recalls. With that dish, she says, "a spell was cast." A decade later, Ms Thaitawat spent a year meticulously researching all facets of Cambodian food, from the dishes served in Phnom Penh's royal palace to the paddy fields and lakes where most Cambodians spend their lives. The resulting book, "The Cuisine of Cambodia," is a rare achievement. The beautifully produced and lavishly photographed cookbook serves as a history of Cambodian food and customs as well as a vital document that will preserve many recipes that have been at risk of disappearing. Like so much of Cambodia's heritage, the country's cuisine has been threatened with extinction by the conflicts that lasted from the 1960s to the 1990s, particularly during the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge. The powerful influences from Vietnam, when it occupied the country during the 1980s, and more recently from Thailand threatened to erase the fine distinctions between Cambodian food and that of its neighbors.
The arrival of United Nations peacekeepers in the past decade brought some stability but it also introduced dishes like pizza and hamburgers, which can muscle our local foods. All this added up to a situation where Cambodians lost confidence in their culinary arts, according Ms Thaitawat. "One of the problems in Cambodia is that because of all the trauma and conflict they lack the confidence to express themselves through their food and to be proud of their cuisine," she said. This is now changing as the country gains some measure of stability and as tourists start to demand a taste of authentic local cuisine.
	Still, as a Thai writer researching Cambodian food Ms Thaitawat had to tread carefully. Many Cambodians have at best an ambivalent relationship with their Thai neighbors, and not offending national sensibilities required some diplomacy. Before embarking on her project, she secured the support of King Norodom Sihanouk, known for his love of food, and the country's Ministry of Tourism. Then she set about collecting more than a thousand recipes. Some came from old cookbooks dating from colonial days that were published in Khmer and French; others were coaxed from sometimes reluctant middle-class families and from people in the countryside who were generally eager to share their culinary secrets. The chapters on the court food were written with the help of the Royal Family and aided by a 1960s book of royal recipes by Princess Norodom Rasmi Sobhana, the King's aunt.
While in exile in Beijing and Pyongyang in the 1980s, the King and another aunt, Princess Mom Ket Kanya, recorded many of the traditional recipes and published them in the King's monthly bulletin. King Sihanouk even contributed his own recipe for "Petits Gateaux de Banane au Beurre de Cacahouette et au Caramel," which translates as "banana, peanut butter and caramel cakes." In English it sounds like the sort of snack Elvis might have favored, but it looks suitably sophisticated in the book.
	Bitter conflicts can arise in all countries over what is seen as authentic and what is terminally tainted by foreign influences, so Ms Thaitawat sent the recipes to the Ministry of Culture, intellectuals in the country and Cambodians abroad before selecting the 200 that finally ended up in the book. Like all foods, the cuisine includes influences and ingredients from around the world, but the aim was to collect those recipes that were regarded as most distinctly Cambodian.
In fact, one of the reasons the book stands out from the mass of food publications is because Ms Thaitawat stuck closely to recipes as cooked by Cambodians, refusing to compromise them for the demands of a Western palate or kitchen. Many of the recipes are easy to follow, with ingredients that are available around the world. But the book doesn't shy away from unusual foods. She included a whole chapter on frogs, caught by villagers using a long fishing line with a bright yellow pumpkin flower as bait. There are also recipes for deep-fried tarantulas from a family in the town of Kieng Svay, while Roland Eng, a senior Cambodian diplomat, contributed a recipe for the more cosmopolitan dish of stuffed crickets cooked with champagne.
	The recipes in the book took Ms Thaitawat and a team of Cambodian cooks four months to test, as few of the older recipes came with any measurements of ingredients. The volume also includes articles about all aspects of Cambodian food. The country has a long history of rice cultivation that was once so advanced that farmers chose from 2,000 varieties of the grain. Nobody knows how many varieties are left nowadays but much of that heritage has been lost.
The production of prahok, fermented fish paste produced each year from the bountiful catch of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap Lake, is in many ways the key to Cambodian food. As well as providing essential proteins and nutrients in rice-based diet and preserving a seasonal glut of fish, the paste is a key flavor in almost all dishes. It comes in numerous varieties depending on which type of fish is used and whether it is fermented with such additions as fish eggs or roasted red sticky rice. There is also a wide range of smoked and dried fish.
	Although Cambodia has been over-shadowed by its neighbors - particularly now that Thai and Vietnamese cuisines have joined the ranks of global foods - it still has something distinctive to offer. "There are lots of similarities with Thai food as we come from the same region," says Ms Thaitawat. "The basis and ingredients are the same but it has evolved differently. They use ingredients that we have lost as we've become a more urban society. In Cambodia, you can walk out of your house and pick these herbs and vegetables and fruits. In Cambodia, they are still more connected to the earth." *Weekend edition, March 23-25, 2001*
The Times Literary Supplement
FIT FOR A KING by Denise Heywood The Cuisine of Cambodia is part history and part celebration of a rich heritage that almost vanished during the Pol Pot regime. Nusara Thaitawat is a Thai journalist who has been visiting Cambodia for ten years. In between articles on war and recovery, she researched the culinary traditions which had been lost during the decades of devastation and starvation.
	Influenced by India and by the years as a French protectorate, Cambodian cooking makes use of the natural bounty of the tropics, with many varieties of fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices, and unique species of fish from the Tonle Sap, the lake in the centre of the country. Thaitawat found old recipes still prepared in private homes, and she collected more than a thousand. Most had no measures for the ingredients, so she experimented with the help of four Khmer cooks, and Supachai Verapuchong of the Sofitel Royal Angkor Hotel. Where she could find no English name for an ingredient, she simply shows a picture. Cooking in Cambodia is still a primitive affair, so counsels: "use this cookbook with a sense of adventure".
The book is beautifully illustrated. Photographs of women working in the rice fields emphasize the fundamental role of rice, which symbolizes life in Cambodia. There are 2,000 indigenous varieties, and it forms the basis of every meal. Prahok, a pungent fish paste, and kroeung, a herb paste made from chillies, lemon grass, turmeric, garlic, shallot, lime and galangal add the exotic flavours.
	Around a hundred dishes are featured, including rice noodles with yellow curry, sour soup with "sanday caviar", stuffed frogs, catfish baked in banana trunk, shrimps and green tamarind, pumpkin custard, fish sauce with mango and Amok, a popular fish curry steamed with cononut in banana leaf. Most Khmer wooden houses are shaded by banana trees, so slipping outdoors for a moment with a sharp knife to secure leaves poses no problem. In Britain, imagination will be needed to supplant such elusive ingredients. Similarly the platter of stir-fried insects (pictures showing a variety of eight-legged creatures of which only grasshopper, cicadas and tarantulas are recognizable) must be taken with a pinch of salt ("these salty treats are the equivalent of potato chips or popcorn").
More refined is the royal cuisine which has evolved over centuries. An old photograph of a young King Sihanouk putting a final touch to poulet de Chine au vin rouge confirms that the King, who wrote the introduction, is a renowned chef. One of his most famous creations, les profiteroles fourrees de cr่me de fromage, has been served to Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. His aunt, Princess Mom, wrote a cookbook before the war, her picture appears here, with details of how the royal family fled when the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, and how the King escaped after the Vietnamese invasion of 1979.
	"Ruling a large kingdom", observed Lao-tzu, "is like cooking a small fish." Perhaps the King, who kept Cambodia neutral until it was engulfed by the Vietnam War, knew the words of the Eastern sage. Lao-tzu meant that both should be handled gently, and as this small kingdom re-emerges from tragedy, The Cuisine of Cambodia is a tribute to the customs and traditions of its courageous people. *July 20, 2001*