Culinary Frights and Delights

Cambodian delicacies involve eating anything that is fresh, cooked with subtle herbs and spices with a Pan-Asian feel that hints at a fusion of Chinese (fish, soy sauce, rice, etc...), Indian (curries, coconut, chapati/rotis) and French (chewy baguettes). Here are just some of the local delicacies and staple dishes I've tried over the last few days:

Amoc: A coconut soup with fish fried in a banana leaf (though you rarely get to see the banana leaf, so I'm skeptical of the street vendors preparation), is meant to capture the quintessential freshness of Cambodian food. There's some sort of stringy cabbage/seawood which is difficult to cut through. In taste, it's pretty good, subtle spices and coconut. In texture, it feels like someone has opened up an audio cassette, unraveled the tape and dumped it hot water.

Bobor (Rice Porridge): This is supposedly a staple dish of Cambodia eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Lumps of rice floating amidst pork and seafood with a healthy amount of salt and Cambodian pepper (a speciality of the southern region). It's quite nice, but just as simple as the translation suggests. And  it's also ridiculously hard to find in touristy areas...

Fried Cricket: Fried until crunchy and infused with herbs, these little critters provide a tasty but insubstantial snack. The shell is like an edible shrimp shell or a large fish scale.

BBQ Snake: I think we tried a simple garden snake, but communication isn't always as clear as needed when you're putting these foreign things in your mouth. There wasn't much meat along the spine, just small slivers I would pick off and pass out. It was a tasty but tough white meat, like a rubbery fish, with a bright red/orange skin that was like a thin rubbery crackling.

Tarantula: On the bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh (and then Sihanoukville), small stalls have bowls of crickets and huge fried, black, hairy spiders. Everyone took pictures of the spiders, but no one wanted to try it. I was dared to, but had just eaten a plate of friend rice - inhaling it for fear of the bus leaving without me - so feeling full, politely declined. But then, I thought there's no point in wasting time and bought one which I shared with the other travelers on the bus (I mostly gave out the legs, as after all, there are eight, more than I need). Fried in the same mix of herbs as the crickets, the legs, head and central part of the body taste the same as cricket, but far more substantial i.e. the outer shell is meaty, even though the inside is hollow. The bulbous part from which a spider spins its web isn't hollow and isn't very nice either. It tastes very powdery, like compacted raw flour, but looks and feels like solidified gelatin.

Comparable to a veritable jungle of culinary delights and frights, I can't say Cambodian food remotely compares to Indian food, but it's definitely exciting at every turn.