The quintessential cuisine
I had wanted to try dog; you can’t come to an Asian country like Cambodia and not eat one of western cultures most loved domesticated animals. To Asians, it’s like Bessy on a bun with ketchup and pickles. Not that it’s actually that common. So I was quite eager to try it and once served over the pile of ubiquitous rice, I picked up a piece and ate it… pretty much like curried beef and surprisingly tender – more so than the average malnourished cow in Cambodia. I grabbed a second bite and inspected it to make sure it was meat and not some other internal component and what should I find but a large dead fire ant clinging to my meat. I laughed and showed it to Rotha saying it must have fallen into the soup while they were cooking it.
Then I looked closer and discovered the entire piece of meat was coated in ants like some kind of Moroccan garnish. Now you have to have seen a Cambodian curry to understand why the presence of several hundred fire might go un-noticed. Cambodian curry is like Sunday-night leftover stew in the States. You grab whatever is left in your fridge and put it all in a pot and heat it up. For Cambodians this is grabbing all manner of flavorful leaves and greens and chopping them up into small pieces. Herbs and spices float in abundance throughout the stew, and the meat itself, rather than being neatly sliced in uniform strips, looks like someone took a big meat cleaver and started hacking at the animal while it was still running away until it was chopped up into little piece, meat, bone, fat, skin, and all… Which is precisely what they do, minus the running part. Frantic hacking with a big meat cleaver on a big wood cutting block is a daily exercise routine for most housewives and seems to also help promote happy marriages as well.
All in all you can see why I might have missed the fire ants the first time around. And yes, I did try another bite. It really was quite fine s sort of like chewing a tender piece of beef heavily garnished in rosemary. I was fortunate however in that I was really only obligated to eat a few spoonfuls, having eaten with my staff only a half hour previous. Showing off aside, and proving my manliness as a Cambodian (who laugh at us not eating dog, but have trouble taking a bite of lasagna), I was happy not to eat the entire bowl full; it had entirely way too much fish sauce.
