“After I’m cooking or consuming, it’s much less painful to recollect,” writes Chantha Nguon within the introduction to her e book, Gradual 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 pressured to flee Cambodia to flee violent persecution by the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The brutal regime would finally trigger the deaths of an estimated 2 million folks—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 Heart, an NGO that gives schooling, social companies, and dwelling wages to ladies 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. Generally 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 at all times 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 flooring 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 at all times had loads to eat; a lot of them didn’t. So my mom and Chanthu normally ready further, 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 big, I couldn’t wrap my arms all the best way 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 shiny 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 metallic 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 have been extra associated to kitchen main- tenance than meals preparation. My mom cooked over wooden and charcoal fires, in three large 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 have been at all times 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 approach. However my present-day kitchen just isn’t as open to the sky as hers was, so after I’m inside the home, I cook dinner on a fuel 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 odor of a charcoal fireplace is the odor of residence and household. My favourite kitchen reminiscences are steeped in that aroma. Day by day after faculty, 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 at all times 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 certain 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 a giant fried fish that was cooling on the counter. To keep away from seize, I swallowed it complete, 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 an alternative she solely requested, “How are you?” each minute or so, wanting alarmed. On the hospital, I stretched out on a protracted metallic desk, the place a health care provider gently slid lengthy forceps into my throat and extracted the stomach bone.
I didn’t study my lesson. In most methods, I used to be an obedient little one, however I couldn’t resist plundering any delicacy left unguarded within the kitchen. My nostril was at all times main me towards temptation and hassle. I’ve an acute sense of odor—my mom at all times stated 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 at all times peel limes earlier than squeezing them. Individuals inform me they will’t style any distinction. However for me, the lime- peel sharpness can smash an in any other case excellent dish.
My nostril has been a present and a curse. I used to be eternally poking it into my mom’s kitchen enterprise, inhaling all the pieces 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.
