“After I’m cooking or consuming, it’s much less painful to recollect,” writes Chantha Nguon within the introduction to her guide, Sluggish Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Household Recipes. After an idyllic childhood in Battambang—a lifetime of simmering stews and the aroma of rice cooking over a hearth—an encroaching conflict left her with nothing however the reminiscences of her mom’s cooking. In 1970, simply earlier than her ninth birthday, her household was compelled to flee Cambodia to flee violent persecution by the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The brutal regime would in the end trigger the deaths of an estimated 2 million individuals—together with Nguon’s mom and siblings. The author would spend greater than twenty years as a refugee earlier than returning to her homeland. At the moment, she’s the cofounder of the Stung Treng Girls’s Growth Middle, an NGO that gives training, social providers, and residing wages to girls and their households in rural northeastern Cambodia. —Alex Testere
“When the water rises, the fish eat ants. When the water recedes, the ants eat fish.”
Khmer Proverb
I spent my first 9 years in my mom’s kitchen in Battambang, Cambodia. Typically I want I may have stayed there for- ever, serving to her chop onions and garlic, working to fetch wooden and water, and falling asleep in a hammock as she rocked me to sleep.
My mom—“Mae,” as I known as her in Khmer—left me nothing however her songs and recipes, and fragrant reminiscences to final the remainder of my life. I used to be all the time happiest in that open, ethereal kitchen. I bear in mind it as being made up of pure mild. A big window excessive within the pale blue partitions framed the intense, tropical sky—a lot blue that the partitions and sky appeared to merge. Daylight streamed into the doorway, which opened onto a slim staircase main right down to my father’s ground-floor auto restore store. A folding desk for eight match right into a nook by the door. Municipal water got here from a faucet within the wall in a cement washing space, the place we did dishes and laundry and typically showered. My oldest sister, Chanthu, sat on a low stool by a drain within the ground to do the washing chores.
Subsequent to that was a smaller window, a portal for leaning out and chatting with our neighbors—the street-food distributors, laborers, and farmers who lived in wood-stilt huts organized round a clearing. We all the time had lots to eat; a lot of them didn’t. So my mom and Chanthu often ready additional, then lowered pots of leftovers out the window, by a string tied to the handles, to our closest neighbor household—I known as her Oum, or “Auntie,” and her daughter, Srey.
Our soup pot was so enormous, I couldn’t wrap my arms all the way in which round it. As soon as, after I climbed the cabinets of a excessive cabinet to search for one thing to eat, I fell backward—proper into the pot, the place Mae was marinating meat for her well-known tamarind stew. She laughed as she helped me climb out, her naughty little daughter marinated in tamarind and stained vivid pink.
I used to be 5 or so when Chanthu lastly let me put a pot of water on the wooden fireplace to boil. I used to be ecstatic! After which, after I was eight, it grew to become my job to pour the new water right into a glass thermos twice a day for my father’s tea. Mae cautioned me by no means to do that alone. The steel thermos case was cracked, which meant you needed to maintain on to the underside to maintain the glass thermos inside from falling out and shattering. I don’t know why my mom by no means changed the damaged case.
Most of my early duties had been extra associated to kitchen main- tenance than meals preparation. My mom cooked over wooden and charcoal fires, in three huge clay braziers on a desk topped with gleaming white tile. The cooking fireplace left pots coated with a cussed black slag, and it was my job to scour soot from the cooking pots till they shone. Black smoke from the braziers poured out the massive window proper subsequent to the cooking space and into the sky, however the fireplace nonetheless left its mark—we had been all the time scrubbing the white tile desk, kitchen partitions, and ceiling.
For my mom, the additional hassle of cooking on an actual fireplace was well worth the reward. To her, meals ready on an electrical burner tasted like nothing. She cherished the richer flavors that wooden and charcoal imparted. I really feel the identical means. However my present-day kitchen is just not as open to the sky as hers was, so after I’m inside the home, I prepare dinner on a gasoline burner. And when I’ve time, I construct a charcoal fireplace on a small clay brazier in my little courtyard and squat over it, boiling bones for soup inventory or grilling beef pierced with bamboo skewers. I may even bake bread and pastries on it.
For me, rice simmered over a charcoal fireplace tastes higher than rice from a rice cooker, and the scent of a charcoal fireplace is the scent of dwelling and household. My favourite kitchen reminiscences are steeped in that aroma. Day by day after college, I went straight to the kitchen to shadow Mae and Chanthu whereas they cooked, begging them to feed me a chew of one thing tasty. Between meals, there was all the time some scrumptious snack to be discovered: a crunchy, candy inexperienced mango dessert, ice-cold from the thermos, or dried lotus seeds from a tin field excessive on a shelf. Within the uncommon moments when the kitchen was empty of cooks, I hunted for some tasty morsel to devour on the sly. I’m positive my mom knew which ingredient had gone lacking, however she pretended to not discover.
As soon as, I stole a chew from the bony stomach of an enormous fried fish that was cooling on the counter. To keep away from seize, I swallowed it entire, with out chew- ing. However my mom and sister discovered me coughing and made me swallow a thumb-sized chew of rice, our treatment for dislodging a caught bone. After ten rice-thumbs, the fish bone had not moved, and my throat began to bleed.
Chanthu hailed a remork (a passenger carriage towed by a bicycle or moto) and rushed me to the provincial hospital. I used to be terrified that she would shout at me for sneaking the fish, however as a substitute she solely requested, “How are you?” each minute or so, wanting alarmed. On the hospital, I stretched out on a protracted steel desk, the place a health care provider gently slid lengthy forceps into my throat and extracted the stomach bone.
I didn’t be taught my lesson. In most methods, I used to be an obedient youngster, however I couldn’t resist plundering any delicacy left unguarded within the kitchen. My nostril was all the time main me towards temptation and hassle. I’ve an acute sense of scent—my mom all the time mentioned so. I can detect a tiny hint of bitterness in a dish brightened with lime; when the juice touches the peel, it carries the bitter style together with it. That’s why I all the time peel limes earlier than squeezing them. Individuals inform me they’ll’t style any distinction. However for me, the lime- peel sharpness can damage an in any other case good dish.
My nostril has been a present and a curse. I used to be endlessly poking it into my mom’s kitchen enterprise, inhaling the whole lot and absorbing the nostril’s classes, just like the before- and aftertastes of including charred scallions to simmering pork inventory—it softens the extra unpleasant aromas of pig fats.
Mae laughed that I used to be identical to a pet, with my voracious, curious nostril. “Pet” grew to become her pet identify for me.
In my protection, I submit that my mom’s fried fish, when left alone in a kitchen, would make a thief of anybody.
