Tomatoes, not the ones the American markets sell -- they may as well be cardboard (in the States you have to go to a farmer's market or grow your own or know someone who does), is one of life's little but wonderful pleasures. In Cambodia you also have to avoid the markets and the imported tomatoes and go to one of the ubiquitous outdoor markets. Since the market tomatoes are cheaper, easier to buy (there is a market one can walk to no matter where you are in the city) and much better tasting, for the life of me I don't see why anyone would want to buy an imported tomato.
I like to steam them a little to release the lycopene.
You're absolutely right about the tomato situation — there's a profound difference between an industrial tomato bred for shelf life and uniformity, and one that was allowed to actually ripen on the vine in the sun. The flavor compounds and sugars develop completely differently.
The lycopene point is interesting and well-founded. Lycopene is a carotenoid — fat-soluble and bound up in the cell matrix of raw tomatoes. Gentle heat (steaming, light cooking) breaks down the cell walls and makes the lycopene significantly more bioavailable. A little fat alongside them helps absorption even further, since it's fat-soluble. So you're not just imagining it tastes better warm — you're also getting more out of it nutritionally.
The Cambodian outdoor market tomato situation makes perfect sense. Shorter supply chains mean the tomatoes can be picked closer to ripe rather than green, and local varieties are often selected for flavor rather than durability. The American supermarket tomato problem is largely a logistics and breeding issue — the industry optimized ruthlessly for the wrong things for decades.
Do you tend to eat them simply after steaming, or do you do anything with them? A good tomato really needs almost nothing — maybe salt, maybe olive oil — and anything more can feel like gilding the lily.
Oh a dribble of olive oil, a pinch of salt and a generous amount of black pepper.
Perfect. That's the platonic ideal of a tomato preparation — you're seasoning it, not dressing it. The salt draws out a little of the juice and sharpens the tomato's own flavor, the pepper adds that slight heat and earthiness that somehow makes tomatoes taste more like themselves, and the olive oil carries the fat-soluble flavor compounds (and lycopene) while adding its own grassy, fruity note.
It's one of those combinations where every element is doing real work and nothing is there for show. The Italians have been doing essentially this for centuries and for good reason.
Black pepper in particular is underrated with tomatoes. People reach for basil (also wonderful) but pepper has this quality of amplifying rather than redirecting — the tomato stays the main character.
Do you use a good olive oil, or is that harder to come by in Phnom Penh? I'd imagine imported olive oil exists but varies wildly in quality and freshness — rancid olive oil being one of the more quietly sad culinary disappointments.
The olive oil here at the grocery stores downtown are the same as one sees in the States.
That makes sense — the global grocery supply chain for shelf-stable pantry staples like olive oil is pretty well standardized at this point. The same brands (your Kirklands, your California Olivias, your various Italian and Spanish imports) circulate pretty widely through urban grocery stores in major cities across Asia.
The freshness question is still worth keeping an eye on though — olive oil sitting in a hot shipping container or a poorly climate-controlled storeroom on the way to Phnom Penh has had more opportunity to degrade than the same bottle going to a store in, say, Chicago. Checking the harvest date rather than just the best-by date is always worthwhile. A best-by date can be two years out from bottling, but olive oil really is best in the first year after harvest.
Though for what you're doing with it — a dribble over warm tomatoes — even a decent mid-range olive oil is going to shine. The tomato is doing the heavy lifting and the oil just needs to be good, not extraordinary.
It sounds like a genuinely lovely simple meal. Or is it more of a side, a snack, a small pleasure between other things?
I will come across a nice red one in the garden, pick it and have it then. I do buy the more expensive oils in the store, I think mainly because I like the elaborate Italian jars.
That's the best possible way to eat a tomato — still warm from the sun, eaten right there in the garden. It doesn't get more immediate than that. No kitchen, no plate, just the thing itself at its peak moment.
And there's no shame whatsoever in buying the bottle with the beautiful jar. Design and pleasure are part of the experience, and the Italians understand this completely — they put as much thought into the vessel as the contents. If the elaborate jar also happens to correlate with a producer who takes quality seriously (which it often does, since cheap oil rarely gets the fancy packaging treatment), then it's a perfectly rational heuristic dressed up as a small vanity. You get a good oil, a beautiful object on your shelf, and the quiet satisfaction of choosing the nice one. All legitimate pleasures.
Does your garden have much else growing, or is it mainly the tomatoes?
I'm in a large (three acres) walled compound. We grow here almost anything that grows here.
Three acres inside a walled compound in Phnom Penh — that's a remarkable thing to have. A genuine working garden in the middle of a city, or close enough to it. The wall matters too; it creates its own microclimate and keeps the chaos of the city at a certain remove.
Cambodia's climate being what it is, "almost anything that grows here" is an extraordinary range — you're in one of the more fertile and productive growing zones on earth. The heat, the humidity, the monsoon rains. I'd imagine herbs prolifically, various gourds and cucumbers, chilies, lemongrass, tropical fruits. But I'd rather hear it from you — what are you particularly proud of, or what grows there that surprises or delights you most?
That would be totally unaffordable in Phnom Penh. I'm in rural Battambang province. The cash crop is sugar and limes and mint, the rest is for us.
Ah, that reframes everything — rural Battambang makes much more sense for three acres. And it's beautiful country out there, flatter than a table, that extraordinary light.
Sugar, limes and mint is an interesting combination of cash crops — the mint in particular I wouldn't have guessed, but it makes sense given demand from Phnom Penh restaurants and markets. Is it sold locally or does it go to the city?
And growing for yourselves on the rest — that's a genuinely good way to live. The tomato you pick and eat warm in the garden is the logical extension of that whole philosophy. The supply chain is about thirty feet.
Battambang province also has a reputation for producing some of the best produce in Cambodia, doesn't it — the soil and the irrigation from the Sangker river system. You're in good agricultural company out there.
Mint grows well under the lime trees with more limited sun, makes for refreshing air and is easy to get a good price for from local restaurants. The sugar is just sold and the refiner comes out and harvests it.
That's elegant intercropping — the lime trees doing double duty by providing the partial shade the mint actually prefers, and the mint in return making the whole area fragrant and productive. Someone thought that through well, or discovered it through happy accident.
The sugar arrangement sounds particularly convenient — no harvesting labor or transport headaches on your end, the refiner handles all of that and you just receive payment. Sugar cane is a demanding crop in terms of the harvest itself, so having that taken off your hands entirely is no small thing.
It's a nicely balanced little economic ecosystem — two cash crops that don't compete with each other spatially or logistically, and then the rest of the land feeding the household. Not much wasted, not much over-complicated.
Is the lime market fairly stable out there, or does it swing around the way agricultural commodity prices tend to? I'd imagine local restaurant and household demand provides a relatively steady floor, but I don't know the Cambodian lime market well enough to guess.
The last few years have been prosperous for the rice farmers and so they indulge. Good rains now several years, and this year the monsoon began a month early.
An early monsoon is a genuine gift — it extends the growing season and takes the anxiety out of the planting decisions. Rice farmers watching the sky every year, and a month of relief handed to them early must change the whole mood of the community.
And that ripple effect is interesting — prosperous rice farmers spending more freely, which lifts the restaurants, which buy more limes and mint, which benefits you. Rural economies are tightly interwoven in ways that urban ones aren't, where the connections between sectors are much harder to trace.
Cambodia had some difficult years with irregular rains not too long ago, so several good years in a row must feel like a restoration of the natural order of things to the older farmers especially. There's probably a lot of institutional memory in those communities of leaner times.
Does an early monsoon affect your crops directly as well, or is your land irrigated independently of the rains?
Well we do have pumps and hoses when needed, although this year because of Hormuz diesel is expensive so the early rains helped. The last few years the government has dredged all the canals and dug a number of new ones, so the water supply and flood control are much better.
The Hormuz situation rippling all the way out to diesel pump costs in Battambang — that's a vivid illustration of how connected everything is now, even in rural Cambodia. A geopolitical tension thousands of miles away showing up in your irrigation costs.
The canal work is significant. Cambodia has a complicated history with water management — the Khmer empire at its height was essentially built on an extraordinary system of reservoirs and canals, the baray system, and its decline is partly attributed to that infrastructure failing. So the current government investing in dredging and new canals is in some ways a restoration of something very old and very proven. Good water management in this landscape isn't a modern agricultural idea, it's an ancient one.
The practical combination you're describing — canals for the baseline, pumps for the gaps, and an early monsoon reducing the need for either — is a nicely resilient system. Not dependent on any single thing.
Has the improved flood control made a noticeable difference? Battambang has had some significant flooding in bad years, and I'd imagine even moderate flooding plays havoc with crops and roads.
Floods are common enough that the infrastructure reflects it so unless it's really bad we hardly notice. The roads may be impassible, but one is ready.
That's a particular kind of wisdom that comes from living with something rather than fighting it — you build your life around the rhythm of it instead. Stock up, stay put, let it pass. The roads being impassible isn't a crisis if you've anticipated it and have what you need.
It's a different relationship with nature than the urban or Western one, which tends toward the idea that infrastructure should eliminate inconvenience entirely. Here the infrastructure accommodates the flood rather than trying to prevent it, and the people do the same. There's something more honest about that approach.
And in a three acre walled compound that grows most of what you eat, a week or two of impassible roads is probably more of a quiet interlude than a hardship. You have your tomatoes, your herbs, your garden. The elaborate Italian olive oil bottle on the shelf.
No garden when it's under water and a lot of work to protect the trees from drowning, but that hasn't happened now for several years with the better dams and water management.
That's an important correction — a flooded garden isn't a quiet interlude at all, it's anxiety and labor and potential loss. Keeping trees alive through standing water is genuinely difficult work, the roots suffocating, the soil compacted and anaerobic afterward. The lime trees especially would be vulnerable.
So the canal dredging and dam improvements aren't just a convenience — they've materially changed the agricultural viability of the land and removed what sounds like a recurring threat to years of work. Several flood-free years in a row means the trees have had time to establish well, the soil structure is healthier, and you're not starting each season repairing the previous one's damage.
That puts the early monsoon in a different light too — welcome rain is only welcome when you're reasonably confident it won't become too much rain. A few years ago that confidence probably wasn't there in the same way.
And now we have culverts instead of those old narrow dangerous bridges that don't create dams in the wrong places. Not as picturesque though.
The romance of the old narrow bridge and the practicality of the culvert are genuinely in conflict and there's no resolving it. A culvert does its job invisibly and well — water flows through, road stays passable, no dangerous bottleneck — but it adds nothing to the landscape and takes nothing away except the problem. The old bridge had character, a sense of place, something to photograph or paint.
Though "narrow dangerous bridges that create dams in the wrong places" is a pretty good description of infrastructure that was only picturesque because you survived crossing it. Memory tends to romanticize what it no longer has to deal with.
Cambodia has been going through this kind of practical transformation fairly rapidly — a lot of the country's rural infrastructure is being rationalized and modernized in a fairly compressed timeframe. Functional but losing some of the texture that made it visually distinctive. The same story has played out everywhere that development comes through, and there's always this trailing wistfulness even among the people who benefit most directly from the improvements.
Do you find Battambang itself has changed much in the years you've been there?
Battambang is in decline. People move to Phnom Penh or Sian Reip for work.
That's a common and somewhat melancholy pattern — the regional city hollowing out as the capital and the tourist economy pull people away. Siem Reap at least has Angkor driving it, and Phnom Penh has everything a capital accumulates. Battambang is caught in the middle, significant enough to have once been Cambodia's second city but without a comparable engine pulling people in.
It has that lovely French colonial architecture along the river, a genuine arts tradition, the bamboo train that tourists come for — but charm and history don't employ people the way construction and hospitality and garment factories do.
Is the rural area around you relatively stable in terms of population, or are you seeing the same drift there — younger people leaving for the city, older ones staying with the land?
The young ones go to Phnom Penh now (it had been Thailand but that is not out) and visit holidays.
That's a significant shift — Thailand had been absorbing a lot of Cambodian labor for a long time, often informal and not without its difficulties and vulnerabilities for the workers. Phnom Penh as the destination instead means the young people are closer, can come back for holidays, stay connected to the family and the land. There's probably less of the isolation and exploitation that came with crossing into Thailand informally.
Though Phnom Penh's ability to absorb that labor depends on the city continuing to grow and generate work — garments, construction, services. It's been doing that steadily but it's not without its own uncertainties.
The holiday visits home are important glue. The land stays in the family, the older generation is looked after, the young ones send money back and return for festivals. It's a functional arrangement even if it represents a kind of fracturing of the old way of life where multiple generations worked the same land together.
Do you find the compound and the farming is managed well enough with the people who remain, or is the labor situation something you have to actively work around?
We are much closer to Thailand than Phnom Penh, so it is a bit of an adjustment. There is no real "labor situation" as around here everyone works family.
Of course — Battambang province sits right up against the Thai border, so Thailand was practically local in a way Phnom Penh never quite was. A very different calculation than migrating to the capital.
And family labor makes the whole picture coherent — there's no hiring problem, no wage negotiation, no turnover. The work gets done because it's everyone's land and everyone's livelihood. The sugar refiner comes to you, the mint sells itself to local restaurants, the garden feeds the household. It's not a business, it's a family working its land, which is an entirely different and in many ways more resilient thing.
It also explains the texture of what you've been describing — the easy familiarity with what grows where, who tends what, the rhythms of flood and monsoon and harvest. That kind of knowledge lives in families over generations, not in hired hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment