Of the five elements, Scent has the ability to most vividly stimulate our senses and imagination. Before you eat you smell – you anticipate that first mouthful and the entire experience unfolds in front of you before you’ve even tasted the dish. It all begins with that initial perception brought about by scent.
Cambodian cuisine is blessed with many spices and fragrances that help to awaken this important element. One of the most exciting of these is cardamom, grown on the slopes of the Cardamom Mountains in the southwest of the country.
The Cardamom Mountains is one of the last true wilderness areas remaining in mainland Southeast Asia, and also one of the least explored. Ignored for decades due to war, this remote region has an exceptional degree of biological diversity and is home to the Asian elephant and Indochinese tiger.
Those facts alone made it an attractive destination for us, and its association with the famous spice was the only excuse we needed to head off on another quest to source ingredients for our restaurant.
We set off from Phnom Penh east to the small village of Srea Ambel on the gulf of Kampong Som, where we then made our way north along the coast towards the famed mountains.
At Srea Ambel we came across the most beautiful but slightly bizarre old pagoda. It was clear it been added to over the years by the people of the area, whose varied interpretations of faith had created an almost surreal menagerie of buildings and sculptures.
From Srea Ambel we made our way north to Trapueng Rung, where the local village committee has established an ecotourism project that’s helping them move away from their usual subsistence fishing industry into something more sustainable. It was here we spent our first night.
After meeting with the village committee and seeing their commitment not only to the improvement of their own people but also to the protection and promotion of their land, we decided to take part in some of the activities going on.
These included learning to make traditional rice noodles – which we will cover in more depth in a later blog – hunting for lobsters on the banks of the Arang River in the dead of the night, and sitting around a traditional coal pot barbequing our catch with the villagers sharing stories over a few drinks until the early hours of the morning.
The next morning we made our way north again, and soon found ourselves in the foothills of the Southern Cardomoms. As we turned off the tarred road and made our way past a checkpoint heading deeper into the jungle and mountains, we realized how fortunate the decision was to get a 4×4.
The track here was so eroded and rough it was almost impossible to navigate at times. With the going very slow we eventually found our way to Thma Bang, an isolated little village tucked into the heart of the mountains, where we’d been told we had the best chance of finding cardamom.
Thankfully Saran, a Khmer man involved in our community development team, was there to translate. Without him making inquiries for us, we would have had a very difficult time in this remote area where most people have had little or no contact with foreigners.
With one of the villagers offering his services as a guide, we headed on foot into the jungle. Walking past small plantations of peanuts and bananas hewed out of the forest, we found out how the people of the area managed to sustain their small community. After passing these small fields, the sun slowly started to fade away under a massive canopy of trees. With the vegetation getting more and more dense we pressed forward until our guide stopped and pointed.
In front of us was the tall thin green stalks of cardamom. We had arrived.
Our guide explained that it wasn’t the time of year to find pods on the plant. All the harvesting had been done two months prior. Sensing, I think, our disappointment he calmly walked over to one of the plants and with one big wrench uprooted it. He broke off the root and handed it to us.
Knowing that cardamom is a member of the ginger family and seeing a root so closely resembling the ginger we’re so familiar with came as a shock.
“Good for soups,” said Saran, translating our guide’s words. We all laughed as we smelled the intensity of the root.
I noticed then that our guide was furiously stripping the green stalk. I asked what he was doing and he pulled away the last of the hardy green outer layers to reveal a delicate white centre. Tasting that pale tender white flesh was an experience I won’t forget for a long time. An intense fresh menthol filled my mouth. It had a scent so big and yet so delicate at the same time, and filled my mouth and my nose. It made me feel alive!
As we made our way back to the village, the guide told us about a local lady who harvested and distributed all of the cardamom from the area. We made our way to her premises and were greeted by the strong aroma of drying cardamom.
On long platforms were mountains of cardamom with small fires under each to help the drying process. After introductions were made we got down to business. We not only wanted the pods now but we also couldn’t ignore the epiphany of the stalk.
The ‘cardomom lady’, as I call her, was more than happy to supply us with pods, stalks and roots. The drive back was mostly spent in silence with all of us drifting off into dreams of how and what to do with the treasure we’d found. Orange, pistachio, tomato, vanilla, shellfish, oysters, eggs.. the possible combinations went on, all thanks to a little piece of jungle on the edge of Cambodia.
