We fell in love with Cambodian food on our first trip to Siem Reap in 2011 to do a story on ‘Siem Reap Beyond the Temples’ for an airline magazine. We’d been living in Bangkok and eating Thai food and other Asian cuisines since our early twenties in Australia. But we’d never tasted anything like Cambodian cuisine. It was a revelation. We loved its gently spiced curries, funky fermented fish dips, sour soups, zingy citrusy salads, and smoky barbecue meats. But it was a couple of dishes that grabbed us: nom banh chok, freshly-made rice noodles in a fish curry, garnished with fragrant herbs and foraged leaves, and Saraman curry, a rich curry with depth and complexity that carried secrets we're still discovering.
After returning to Bangkok, I began to research Cambodian food and its history, but I kept coming up with very little at all. I thumbed through Asian cookbooks. They rarely contained Cambodian recipes. We went to bookshops to seek out Cambodian cookbooks. The few that existed were generic, vague, and skimmed over the history. Apart from a few by Khmer-Americans, the cookbooks rarely told stories about their authors. Locally produced books revealed even less. Yet the more I read about Cambodia's long rich history, the more I ate the food, the more I made connections between Cambodian dishes and that of its neighbours. I'd read Cambodian cuisine was influenced by neighbouring cuisines, yet began to realise it was mostly the other way around. I knew there were countless stories to be uncovered and told.
The more research I did, the more I realised how much Cambodian cuisine and its history had been overlooked, misunderstood and under-appreciated. It made me terribly sad, even angry. This was a cuisine that deserved greater recognition. So in 2013 I started my Cambodia culinary history research and in October that year, my husband Terence and I decided to write a Cambodia cookbook, an epic tome that would change the way that the world thought about Cambodian food. We're still unearthing so much every day and have made it our mission to continue until we're done. I've been sending out proposals to editors and I'll keep doing that until I find a publisher for the book.
Until then, I'm inviting you to support our work for the price of a cup of coffee.