Home of aroma

February 14, 2010

www.Cambodiaonline.com.au

Graham Simmons follows his nose - and his taste buds - to a workshop keeping local arts alive.

Graham Simmons follows his nose - and his taste buds - to a workshop keeping local arts alive.

Idon't know which is more intense - the flavour of amok frog or the fragrance of the spices used to prepare the dish. The former has more of an impact but the aroma-memory is certainly longer-lasting. And in few places are the arts of flavours and scents more highly developed than in Cambodia. In the village of Aw Phea Sang in Takeo Province, about 40 kilometres from the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, a whole cottage industry has grown up, with amok khong-khaeb (as it is locally known) being the main product.

Frogs are raised to maturity and then, after being slaughtered, their legs are removed and diced. The diced legs are mixed with pork mince, lemongrass, chilli, garlic and amok spices, the mixture placed in the frog's stomach and the stuffed frog is skewered on a bamboo stick and grilled over charcoal.

The result is unexpectedly tasty, with the lemongrass being overwhelmingly the most distinctive flavour. Travelling to Siem Reap, I wanted to find out how amok spices are prepared - and there could be no better place to start than at Stephane Bourcier's Senteurs d'Angkor workshop. Starting 10 years ago with a shop in Siem Reap's Old Market area (Psaar Chas), Bourcier built a self-supporting artisan network making herbal soaps, incense and candles, essential oils and organic packaging products for Khmer spices.

The shop soon outgrew its site, so new premises had to be found. Opened in September last year, the new Senteurs d'Angkor workshop now employs more than 100 people - 80 per cent of them disadvantaged rural women.

"The objective of this workshop is to showcase Cambodian crafts made by Cambodians from local raw materials," Bourcier says. "We strive to provide good working conditions for our employees and to allow visitors to discover crafts that are truly local, unlike a lot of things in the shops here that are imported."

I'm shown around the workshop grounds by a gracious young lady who speaks excellent English. She first points out the area where packaging products are made from sugar-palm bark. The bark strips are vividly dyed, then hung on racks to dry before being hand-woven into little boxes, packing tubes and so forth. Other strips are used to make quiver-like containers for the prized Kampot pepper.

The Chinese explorer Zhou Daguan first made mention of pepper being grown in Cambodia way back in the 13th century. But by the late 1800s, war was raging in another key pepper-growing area - Aceh in Indonesia.

Spice importers turned to Cambodia's Kampot region, where production reached more than 8000 tonnes a year by the year 1900. The volume dropped to about 3000 tonnes a year by the 1950s but the product was of exceptional quality, making Kampot the pepper of choice in top French restaurants.

Tragically, the five years of Khmer Rouge terror and the ensuing civil war put an end to pepper production in Cambodia. Finally, in about 1998, former growers started to return to the district.

Now, some 150 families are growing pepper around Kampot. But production is still only about 20 tonnes a year and it will take years for output to rebound fully. In the meantime, Kampot pepper remains the world's finest and most expensive "Black Gold".

Many other products are also made and processed at the Senteurs d'Angkor. I visited the spices room, where the ingredients for amok - lemongrass, turmeric, galangal, dried garlic, green chilli and shredded coconut - are blended carefully. The nearby incense-making room is also a cornucopia of different aromas.

But I couldn't help thinking of those poor little frogs at Aw Phea Sang. I sincerely hope their demise was as humane as possible. Maybe their fate derives from the influence of the French, who taught the arts of both cuisine and perfumery to a people who, it seems, were only too eager to learn.