Return to Cambodia
"No, no!" shouts Gérard, "Let him go. Tell her we don't want to eat him." The young girl carrying the giant turtle just plucked from between the stilts of our restaurant on the banks of the Mekong River in Phnom Penh pauses, confused, on her way back to the kitchen and then returns the reprieved terrapin to the lotus-studded marsh below.
As it turns out, that turtle is one of only a few things that we don't eat during our gastronomic tour of Cambodia.
Longteine (Nyep) de Monteiro and her husband, Kenthao (Ken), with their daugh- ters Launa and Nadsa and the daughters' husbands, Gérard Lopez and Bob Perry, run two highly regarded Boston restaurants devoted to the cuisine of Cambodia—both called The Elephant Walk. I first met Nyep two years ago, when she interviewed me as the possible coauthor of a cookbook she wanted to write about Cambodian, or Khmer, food (which is influenced by Indian and Chinese cuisines, is subtler than Thai cooking, and uses more spices than Vietnamese). I got the job, and a few months later I found myself accompanying the de Monteiros on a trip back to their native Cambodia. There was an element of poignancy to the journey, and uncertainty; The family had become exiles when the communist Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975—and hadn't been back since.
Both Nyep and Ken were born into the Cambodian elite: She is the daughter of the country's first licensed veterinarian; he comes from a long line of de Monteiros, descendants of a 16th-century Portuguese physician. Shortly after the couple's arranged marriage, in 1957, Ken was elected to the national assembly. In 1960, he was made minister of national education and, two years after that, vice president of the national assembly. When Launa and Nadsa were still young, Ken joined the diplomatic service, and the family moved abroad, first to the Philippines, then to Yugoslavia, then to Taiwan. No matter where they were, however, Nyep was responsible for entertaining a flurry of international guests, and her French and Cambodian cooking won regular raves.
Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge while the family was living in Taiwan. This left the de Monteiros suddenly homeless and Ken without a career. So they moved to France, ending up in Béziers, an historic town in the Languedoc. There, with no other prospects of supporting their family, they opened a Cambodian restaurant, with Nyep as chef and Ken running the dining room. Meanwhile, Nadsa relocated to Boston, and in 1990, Nyep and Ken moved there as well, followed by Launa and her husband, and soon they opened the first of their two Elephant Walks. (The second was not up and running until 1994.) Around the time that the political situation in Cambodia seemed to stabilize, they started thinking about returning for a visit. When Nyep decided to write her cookbook, the trip took on a professional purpose as well.
Our first morning in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, we leave the hotel before nine, and—as if tracing a map of the country's history—make our way down Quai Karl Marx, around the Victory Monument, a statue commemorating independence from France in 1953, and along Siwotha Boulevard, named for the man who led a rebellion against King Norodom (his own half-brother) in the 1870s. (These street names have since changed, along with the political scene.) Once a jewel of Southeast Asia, today the city looks bombed-out and haggard, after more than 20 years of assault and occupation by the Khmer Rouge and foreign forces. Streets are rutted (many have returned to dust) and piles of garbage are mounded high along their edges. Motos (small motorbikes) whiz past, some loaded with crimson litchis or huge sacks of rice on their way to market, some carrying passengers, women in long silk skirts, their ankles crossed and their children tucked in around them. Archaic cyclos (three-wheeled rickshas) move briskly around us.
Despite all this, I am stunned by Cambodia's delicate beauty. Trees are weighed down with ripe bananas, papayas, and mangoes, and sampans are gracefully poled out into the Mekong River. It also seems that everywhere—at makeshift stands, alongside wooden carts, and in plastic chairs that practically spill out into the roadways—people are jabbing chopsticks into giant bowls, most of which hold either soup or rice porridge. "This is the same," Nyep says. "This is how it always was."
For our first meal, Nyep directs us to one of the many new dining establishments along the river. Before 1975, most restaurants in Cambodia were either Chinese or French, the choice of the colonial aristocracy. Now, a legion of eateries competes for the tourist trade, and traditional Cambodian food, like that served at the restaurant we enter, is one of the most popular offerings.
After carefully studying the menu, Nyep chooses an array of what she considers typical Khmer dishes including fresh turtle soup (which Gérard promptly vetoes), a spicy chicken stir-fry with lemongrass, a soup of braised venison with shallots and garlic, and three fish dishes: elephant fish with a sweet-and-sour sauce ("Chinese-style," she admits); mudfish with a green mango sauce; and one of the most popular items at the de Monteiros' restaurants back home: tuk kroeung. (All spellings of Cambodian foods are from the de Monteiro family as contemporary transliterations of the Khmer language vary.) This is a thick dip made of grilled fish, mint, red pepper, tamarind, and, in this case, peanuts and fish eggs, and it comes with a platter of raw vegetables—tomatoes, Thai eggplants, cabbage wedges, and a regional green called popeay.
The table is set with large bowls of rice and small dishes of salt and pepper, kaffir lime slices, tiny red bird's eye chiles, and tuk trey, or fish sauce. It all makes for a riotously sensual still life, but we are far from still ourselves, reaching and dipping and tasting in many directions, all at once. The three Elephant Walk chefs among us (Nyep, Gérard, and Nadsa) eat critically and find that they are disappointed in dishes like the pleah saiko, a lime juice–cured beef salad. Nadsa pronounces it too sweet, with too much lemongrass, and Nyep agrees, convinced that the sweetness is a Thai influence—the result of so many Cambodians having lived in refugee camps in Thailand. "Maybe the recipe for pleah saiko is lost," she laments. "Maybe people are just making it up. Someone needs to save the real thing."
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