Phnom Penh, Cambodia – Cambodia: A gastronomical paradise – if you’re an anteater.
They like insects.
Or a vulture. They like anteaters.
My late cat, Sport, would’ve liked it here, too. She would have had fun chasing my lunch across the plate, if she could catch it. And if it didn’t eat her first.
I am vacationing in Cambodia before it becomes another Thailand which, before the tsunami hit, had become so overrun with European packaged tourists, it sported bratwurst shops on the beach. Cambodia is far from spoiled. In Thailand I never saw anyone selling deep-fried tarantulas.
They do here. And fruit bat. And boa. And dog. And, yes, anteaters. And every imaginable bug that scampered across your kitchen floor when you turned on the light.
Taking my “When in Rome” dining philosophy to new disgusting lows, I arrived in Cambodia in late May hoping to tour Angkor Wat, explore little-known islands and repulse family and friends.
Read on. I achieved the latter.
I checked in at the California 2 hotel, the nerve center for Phnom Penh’s thriving ex-pat community. On the wall is a picture of two Cambodian women next to a silver serving tray piled high with a black mass that looked like melting licorice sticks. I looked closer. They weren’t licorice sticks.
They were tarantula legs.
“That’s from Schoon,” said the San Diego-transplanted owner, Jim Heston, of a town halfway between here and Angkor Wat.
“That’s the spider capital of Cambodia.”
Imagine reading that on a welcome banner heading into town.
Overhearing our conversation about all weird things Cambodian, a grizzled Brit who’d obviously been in Phnom Penh too long, remarked, “Careful of the dog. Sometimes they’ve been hanging there a little too long.”
Other than that, they have fine food in Cambodia. It’s similar to mild Thai cuisine. But Cambodia is also known for some of the weirdest foods on the planet.
After being absolutely insulted by the dismal quality of grilled snakehead in Ho Chi Minh City a few days before (The quality was fine, but snakehead turned out to be a fish you can now find in the Potomac), I ventured to Phnom Penh’s Central Market.
Known as Psar Thmei locally, it is a monstrous gold dome selling everything from overpriced jewelry to under-priced Columbia sportswear. That windbreaker you wore on your hike last weekend was made here.
It’s also absolutely roasting inside. If you happen to be a pile of leavened dough, Psar Thmei is a great place to be baked into a loaf of French bread. But outside, it’s a fine place to indulge in your own personal “Fear Factor” without annoying TV cameras recording your revulsion.
At the end of a row of booths, three women squatted behind five big baskets. One was absent-mindedly picking out items, peeling them and popping them in her mouth. It wasn’t saltwater taffy.
It was crickets.
Big ones. Deep fried with wings. I looked around and the booth was a smorgasbord of Cambodian insect cuisine. The crickets came in three sizes: small, medium and Defense Department.
They were nothing. Next to them was a pile of what appeared to be 4-inch-long green cockroaches. These things needed air-traffic control to land on your kitchen counter. And they appeared to be moving. Turns out, the oil smeared on their backs occasionally made a few slip down the pile.
I looked at the fifth basket holding a pile of black water beetles. They seemed harmless enough. Nope. Not even close. A Brit saw me eyeing them and said, “Don’t try those. You know when you turn over a cockroach and that orange-yellowish fluid comes out? It’s the same with these. The taste is absolutely repugnant.”
Still, when in Phnom Penh …
As I bought three crickets and the ‘roided cockroach for 1,000 riel (about 25 cents), I was reminded of why I had heard Cambodians sometimes ate cockroaches in the first place.
Barking at me in a smattering of Khmer were three beggars rapidly closing in. One man pointed his stumps of two arms at me. Another on crutches was missing his left leg and left eye. Another one-legged man couldn’t even afford crutches and hobbled after me.
All were apparent victims of the vicious Pol Pot regime, a failed agrarian reform in which, from 1975-79, an estimated 2 million people died from either slaughter, starvation or the 1 million land mines scattered around the countryside, many of which still remain.
I took refuge in the safe haven of my hotel lobby. I poured the insects onto a plate and the Cambodian hotel clerk, using a weird sixth-sense backpacker telepathy, immediately gave me a can of Anchor beer.
Eyeing the cockroach, which seemed to eye me back, I ordered another beer.
And another.
A taxi driver in front of the hotel spotted my lunch. He walked over and pointed to the cockroach. If it pointed back, I was heading to the airport.
“Oh, I remember those when I was a kid!” he said. “I liked them a lot.”
Samnieng Bee, 33, told me it was not a cockroach. It’s called a kadam tuk. In his eastern rural province of Prey Veng, during the rainy season in June and July, they fly into rice paddies like a squadron of fighter jets. They lay an egg on a rice straw and when it’s born it goes into the water.
Bee’s family would catch them by putting a bright light over a mat at night. Attracted to the light, the bugs would smash into it with a sound similar to a Buick ramming a steel girder. They then fall to the mat for collection later.
“When they bite,” Bee said, “it’s very painful.”
But I imagined if I bite them, it’s very painful, too. Bee gave me a lesson on how to eat a bug that I kept thinking I saw in a Japanese movie somewhere.
First, you peel off the wings. Fried, they come off like rice paper around an egg roll. Next, you take your middle finger and gouge into the body.
When it breaks, the inside reveals a massive coagulation of green eggs.
Yes, folks, with the level of trepidation I normally reserve for college football locker rooms, I scooped up the gelatinous green goo and put it in my mouth.
While I wouldn’t recommend it on water crackers for your next poolside soiree, it wasn’t repulsive. It had the consistency of couscous and the bland flavor of raw oatmeal. Still, I haven’t chugged a beer that fast since my fraternity initiation.
Crickets take a little more care. Again, you peel off the wings, and Bee showed me how to snap the body in two.
“Now eat the head,” he said.
He wasn’t smiling. It crunched in my mouth like a stack of bitter potato chips, which is similar to what it tasted like if you can imagine Pringles laced with motor oil.
I then made a mistake. Even Bee laughed when I bit into the body before peeling off the hard shell. It tasted like rancid shrapnel.
“Um, they’re more tasty when they’re fresh,” Bee said as the beer truck I ordered backed up to the hotel door. “Maybe these were fried a few days ago.”
But don’t let a stale cricket or two spoil your view. Come to Cambodia. And bring an appetite. A big one.
Staff writer John Henderson normally covers sports and writes an occasional food journal. He can be reached at jhenderson@denverpost.com or 303-820-1299.
