Khmer Food

Ovens are not part of the ordinary Cambodian Kitchen or small restaurent, for cooked food is either boiled, fired, or stir-fired. Cambodian food is never bland. Its range of spices includes chili, pepper, coriander leaf and root, lemon grass, basil, ginger, mint, cardamom, and screw pine. Sour soups are popular meat and fish are always served with sauces like shrimp paste, tamarind, or honey with chili. Fish sauce is the basic substitute for salt across the country. Spicy salads are a local specialty. They are made from raw prawns, mean, green papaya, field crab, or shopped raw meat, with chili and other spicies. Like the various noodle dishes, they are often sold at street side stalls for those who want a light meal. Cambodians have no food bias and are always willing to try any sort of meant, wild or domestic and most seafood.

A traditional meal before western influence introduced tables and chairs. Cambodian dined by sitting on the floor around a small, short table. Various curries and other dishes were set upon the table, lke cabbage and green bean skewered or fried meant, crab or fish. The hot, sour soup that is part of any full-course Cambodian meal was cooked in a clay pot that was placed in the center of the table. Rice was served in small bowls to each person, who then used spoons or chopsticks to select pieces of food from the other bowls. Each diner also had a separate soup bowl that he or she filled from the common pot. That ancient style of eating has no changed much, the only exception is that the food has been transferred to a taller table. Soup is still cooked in the center, if not in a clay pot then in a wheel-shaped pan. But throughout the countryside, the old way still exists.

Rice several months of hard labor go into providing Cambodia supper tables with their most important foot-rice Farmers have to break up the hard ground during the dry season of he year and plough it with the first drops of rain. Rice seedlings are firstly planted in one part of the field, where they grow while the farmer cultivates and prepares another part of the field in which the rice will be transplanted at the start of the heavy rain season. Weeds and pests attack the rice field crabs, mice and herons keep the farmers busy. After the rains comes the harvest, followed by the exhausting job of threshing, winnowing and milling the rice grains. Most Cambodian prefer the highly polished variety called Angkar Laar or "beautiful rice".

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