‘Rainy season,’ she shot back immediately, as she almost always does when she responds to what she considers to be yet another idiotic question. ‘In rainy season I catch frogs every day, no problem.’ Pee loves frogs, maybe even more than she loves crickets, although for most people here it’s just the opposite. My theory is that she loves frogs more than crickets (though not to get me wrong, Pee loves crickets, too) because for cooking, frogs are more versatile. And Pee loves to cook, maybe even more than she loves frogs.
Pee wakes up almost every morning between four-thirty and five, the sun not coming up until well after six. She knows that I am deeply asleep, but still I hear her voice, as if in a dream: ‘What you like for breakfast? You like frog? You want chicken?’
She gets out of bed and heads immediately down the steep wooden stairs of the traditional Khmer-style house, perched high on wooden stilts, finding her way in the dark to the three small earthenware stoves set up immediately in front between the house and the dirt road, just like every house in the village. She gets one fire going, maybe two. To light the charcoal, she first lights long, thin, resinous sticks, and when they’re burning, she starts to stack the charcoal. All the charcoal is made household by household and ‘cooked’ in mud ovens that look like bread ovens using prunings from mango trees, jackfruit and tamarind; Kravan is intensely tropical.
Once the fires are started, Pee will take a shower or stroll across the street to chat with Oie or An. Early-morning life is very social in the village. By five o’clock I am generally the only person in the village not yet awake. When I first arrived here, I was accustomed to waking at nine o’clock, a good ‘compromise’ hour, not too early, not too late. Initially, Kravan was a big adjustment!
If Pee decides to cook chicken, she simply takes a slingshot hanging from a nail on the wall and finds a few stones, then, with deadly aim, targets a chicken that she’s most likely had her eye on for a while. One afternoon, sitting on the large wooden platform in the shade of the overhang (where we spend most of every day here in the hot season), she scornfully nodded her head, a typical gesture in north-eastern Thailand, in the direction of one particular squawking chicken. ‘Noisy chicken,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow, soup.’
Kravan, in Thai terms, is a poor village, as are most villages in this part of Thailand. Last year, before coming to Kravan, I lived for a year on a farm about an hour’s drive west of here; I write cookbooks for a living, so here for me is both life and work, but the two have become increasingly indistinguishable these last few years. It was on the Yindichati farm where I lived previously that I first encountered the concept of ‘free’ food. Mae and Pa – the two incredible people who owned the farm, and who have knowledge and skills specific to the farm that no future generation can ever hope to have – would tell me at night to eat more rice: ‘free food’. ‘And eat more fish,’ father would say, smiling. ‘Free.’ Free food is the food that’s grown, that’s harvested, and it accounts for almost everything eaten. There’s very little cash money, but there’s food, unbelievable food.
When I first arrived in Kravan a few months back, everything felt wonderfully familiar, all life revolving around rice farming and subsistence agriculture. But in Kravan, I’ve found over time, there’s actually much that’s different. Kravan is ethnically Khmer. Everyone, when speaking together, speaks Khmer, a language absolutely not related to Thai or to Lao. When they speak with me, they speak Lao or even Thai, especially the children now learning Thai in school. Also, Kravan is an actual village, a very tight, intimate assemblage of houses, and the rice fields surround the village. The Yindichati farm, in contrast, is in a region primarily populated by people who speak Korat, a language somewhere in the middle between Lao and Thai. What they call ‘the village’ are individual farms set one after another in a two-mile stretch down a dirt road, like farms in the American Midwest.
Kravan, I am quickly coming to realise, is also considerably poorer than the Yindichati farm. People’s landholdings here are tiny in comparison. Pee has four rai, or approximately 1.6 acres, while the Yindichati farm has 117 rai. Late one afternoon a few days back, I went to the farm with Pee to forage. The fields are deadly dry here in late April and early May, parched beyond description with the fierce heat of every day. We sat under a big tree talking about the weeks to come, about how we will plant the fields and what we must do to get them ready. At some point Pee got up to go, a plastic bag and her long narrow (and always razor-sharp) spade in hand. We headed off across the fields, Pee looking down, an eagle on a hunt. Mid-conversation she suddenly started to dig, fiercely, through the red lateritic soil now baked hard as clay brick.
‘Maybe snake,’ she told me matter-of-factly. ‘A crab hole, but maybe a snake moved in.’ The hole was long, and Pee kept digging, horizontally. Finally, nothing. So we moved on. Another hole, this one fruitful: a crab. Pee picked it up, put it into the bag, and we moved on again. Pee foraged for an hour, maybe more. She found crickets, more crabs. ‘Everything goes under the ground now. It’s too hot. Soon the rain will come and the frogs will come back.’
As early evening at last began to arrive and the heat finally began to give way, the towering coconut palms, the fifty-year-old mango trees, the leucaena, everything all around took on a soft tropical glow. Pee set down her spade and turned her attention to picking tree leaves. ‘Khilek, you know?’
‘Yes,’ I answered proudly, knowing it from the Yindichati farm. But unfortunately it was the only one that I did know. Pee moved from tree to tree, explaining as she picked the leaves what she’d use them for. Some are kom, or bitter, a common taste here in the wild foods that I am still trying to get used to. It’s yaa, or medicine, people always explain to me when eating very bitter leaves. And I am sure they are right, but for me, bitter’s still bitter.
Other leaves are for nam prik, a category of chilli pastes, or salsas, for lack of a better word. There are a million different nam priks, and most are complicated and labour intensive. They’re the heart of the cuisine, the number-one sign of a cook’s skill. Almost exclusively they’re made in Thai-style mortar and pestles, the pestle being made from a hard tropical wood. The nam prik is made by pounding, pounding, pounding. Little red hot bird chillies will usually be the first ingredient pounded, followed by tiny garlic and small Asian shallots. But from then on there’s infinite variety.
One of Pee’s favourite ways to use tiny frogs (and I mean tiny, about an inch to two inches in length) is to grill them over charcoal in a metal grilling basket. Most of the grilled frogs get pounded into a nam prik. One of Pee’s favourites is a combination of grilled frog and green mango, a nam prik so fiery hot you would not believe.
When I stagger down to breakfast, proud of myself at six in the morning, Pee is often grilling tiny frogs. I squat down to watch what she’s doing; Pee will cook for an hour, squatting, never sitting. When the frogs start to crisp, she’ll open up the grilling basket and give me two or three frogs to nibble on. They’re hot and delicious.
‘Lao khao?’ Pee will inevitably ask.
‘Sure,’ I answer; the combination of rice whisky – mixed with a Chinese medicinal herbal drink – served with hot, freshly grilled frogs is impossible to turn down. It’s the essence of morning in Kravan. A few weeks ago it dawned on me that I hadn’t drunk a cup of coffee in months, and I’m a person who’s been drinking coffee religiously for thirty-five years!
As we were about to leave the farm that day, dusk giving way to dark, Pee let out a scream. Up a tree she’d suddenly spotted a large red ant nest, the prize of the day. She found a long length of bamboo and tied her spade to the end of the bamboo, then dislodged the nest without having to climb the tree. She gathered the red ant eggs into her plastic bag and we happily rode the motorbike back home in the dark.
Red ant egg salad is my personal favourite, even better than crispy grilled tiny frog.
It’s amazing how the rites and rhythms of life slip inside you here, out in the country. How one thing flows
so easily into another, dawn to dusk, dry season to rainy season, frog to chicken to snake.
Yesterday Pee and I got married. Work merged into life.
The Best Meal I Ever Had
ANDREW McCARTHY
Andrew McCarthy has written for the Atlantic, Slate, Men’s Journal, Travel + Leisure and Bon Appétit, among others. He is a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler. He has also eaten his way around the world as an actor.
‘What do the stars next to the numbers on the badges mean?’
‘Those are the ones who give you a bath first.’
‘Ah.’
‘You want that.’
‘Sure,’ I said, my head nodding up and down.
We were looking through a large picture window at twenty or so women sitting on tiered benches. They were dressed in evening gowns. It was three thirty in the afternoon.
‘This is where the politicians come, so you can relax,’ David said. I must have looked puzzled. ‘So they’re clean,’ he went on. I nodded some more – it was my first time in a bordello and I guess it showed. ‘Maybe we ought to have a beer first,’ he suggested, and crossed into the empty bar.
David was an American photographer who had escaped to Southeast Asia years earlier. We had met in Saigon and agreed to hook up for a couple of nights of good clean fun in Thailand. But I hadn’t had a drink in years and a whorehouse in Bangkok on a wet Tuesday afternoon didn’t seem like the place to start.
‘You know what, David, I think I’m gonna get that train up to Vientiane after all.’ I had been considering a trip north, to Laos.
The northern Thai border with Laos had only recently been opened and there was a train from Bangkok every evening. It arrived in Nong Khai, on the bank of the Mekong River on the Laotian border, before dawn, where, I was to discover, entrepreneurs stormed the train, woke you from a sound sleep, grabbed your bag, and threw it on the back of their túk-túk as you gave chase through the pre-dawn mist. They then demanded a dollar, deposited you on a waiting bus that drove a few hundred yards and unloaded you on the Thai side of ‘Freedom Bridge’, which you walked across under the watchful eye of armed guards, after which you went through a version of customs and were released to fend for yourself among the eager capitalists of Laos at daybreak. But before I was to learn any of that, I first had to get out of the whorehouse in Bangkok.
I left David at the bar to mull over his options, hurriedly checked out of my hotel, crawled through the Thai traffic, and was at the train station with nearly an hour to spare. The short time spent in the brothel had depressed me. The more ladies the host had offered, the more lonely I felt. So as I sat back on a hard wooden bench in Hualamphong Station, watching the crowds mill anonymously by and listening to the tracks called out in a language that was indecipherable to me, I was glad to be getting out of town, glad to be on my own again. I began to take wilful pride in the fact that no-one I knew in the world could find me. I was a stranger in a foreign land. Alone. The relief of solitude masqueraded as contentment.
I was suddenly starving. An exhausted-looking conductor confirmed there would be no dinner on the train and a quick search of the terminal revealed one forlorn restaurant. I opened the door. The place was deserted except for a group of what seemed to be staff members sitting around a large bowl in the centre of a table. I took a seat on the other side of the room. A stout woman got up from the table, came over and conveyed to me in Thai that the place was closed. My head sunk. She touched my shoulder, said something I couldn’t understand, and went back to her bowl with the others.
I gathered up my bags. As I shuffled towards the door, the woman waved me over to their table and an older man with thin white hair got up and dragged over a chair. The two younger ones slid their seats closer together to make room. I demurred. They insisted. One of the younger men handed the woman a bowl; she filled it and placed its steaming contents in front of me and they returned to the business at hand. The silence of a good meal being well eaten ensued and I realised I was sitting among three generations of a family at dinner.
Conversation eventually filled the table – words I could not understand followed by laughter I could. The large bowl in the centre of the table emptied. The last drops went to me. I finished my fish soup and looked at the faces around me, strangers no more.
Ten minutes later, walking down the platform, I found myself sad to be leaving Bangkok. I stepped onto the train and said aloud, to no-one in particular, ‘That may have been the best meal I ever had.’
The Rooster’s Head in the Soup
TIM CAHILL
Tim Cahill is the award-winning author of nine books, including Jaguars Ripped My Flesh and Hold the Enlightenment. He is the co-writer of three IMAX movies, two of which were nominated for Academy Awards. Cahill has also written for National Geographic, Outside and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications. He lives in Montana.
Do you eat the thing or what? It’s a rooster’s head and it’s floating in the soup. You are in a dirt-floored hut, a two-room adobe family home up in what is called the Eyebrow of the Jungle, the Ceja de Selva, in the cloud forests of Peru. The Peruvian family has allowed you to camp on their little farm and now they’ve invited you to dinner. Out comes the first dish. It’s a yellow soup. And there’s a rooster’s head floating in it. Skeletal thing: no skin or eyeballs. Nothing inside the cranial cavity at all.
That was the first time I asked myself the Question most avid travellers are presented with at one time or another. Are they making fun of me, or is the rooster’s head really given to the honoured guest? Back then, I spent some moments wrestling with the implications. Ruminating, so to speak. Assumption #1: they are, in fact, making fun of me. Okay. What’s the worst that can happen? I chomp down on the fragile bones of the skull and everyone bursts out laughing. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I was the object of hilarity. I can generally salvage that situation by simply laughing right along with everyone else. They might think I’m an imbecile, but no-one is going to be insulted.
Now assume that the rooster’s head is, in fact, a local delicacy. If you treat it as a joke, there is a good chance you will alienate your hosts. You absolutely do not want to alienate your hosts. Not up here in the Eyebrow of the Jungle where the trails are steep and sometimes lead to a crumbling precipice over a 5000-foot drop. You don’t want to alienate your hosts if you need them to tell you where the pre-Columbian ruins are. You don’t want to alienate your hosts if you are going to camp in their vicinity for several days because you are, in fact, genuinely interested in the local culture. Finally, you don’t want to alienate them because refusing a delicacy might be a mortal insult, to be avenged with machetes. Probably not, but why take the chance? Let them laugh instead.
So the Answer to the Question is simple enough: you eat what’s put in front of you. It’s a no-brainer. Just like that white avian skull, floating in the soup.
The fowl tale I’ve recounted happened in Peru over three decades ago, but I’ve spent a lot of the intervening time travelling in the hinterlands of various countries, and something similar has happened to me on every continent, save Antarctica. Out in the back country, in those remote places where folks do not have much contact with the outside world, people tend to be generous with their food. Some kind family is always offering me something that, at first glance, does not seem to be 100 per cent palatable. Baked turtle lung. Sheep’s eyeballs.
Smile and choke it down. That’s my policy. If they have something vaguely alcoholic to drink – palm wine, corn beer – all the better. In central Africa, under the Virunga volcanoes, people make a kind of banana beer they call pombe that is served in one-litre brown glass bottles that once contained beer. Pombe simply means beer in Swahili, but I was cautioned about this banana variety: don’t pour it into a glass, said the brewer himself; you don’t want to actually see it. The pombe is best drunk with a wooden straw. This is because the fermenting bananas leave a thick layer of black sludge on the
glass. I’ve since learned that, in the final brewing process, the beer can be filtered through a fine cloth. I’m thinking that my brewer may have found that process superfluous.
Banana pombe was the after-work libation for a couple of African guides who were taking me out to see a group of mountain gorillas. The animals lived low on the volcanoes, in the visually limited world of the bamboo forests, and care had to be taken not to blunder onto the gorillas and startle them. They could run away. Or charge. Neither situation was ideal.
So it was thirsty work, crawling through the bamboo along a gorilla path, trying not to make any noise. When we walked home in the evening, the guides always checked a certain home built of sturdy wooden slats. If there were flowers in a vase on the porch, it meant that the brewer who lived there had pombe. We were obliged to stop and help this gentleman dispose of the beer, which has about a 48-hour shelf life. It was our duty. Should the brewer have unsold bottles on his shelf he could, the guides informed me solemnly, simply stop making pombe.
The stuff was a titch sweet and seemed to contain as much alcohol, drop for drop, as anything brewed by Anheuser-Busch. It was fine to sip beer through a straw after a sweaty day of crawling after primates. The way I saw it, I was helping the brewer and the community’s beer drinkers, and learning all kinds of things about gorillas I might never have found out entirely sober.
While my policy is to eat what is put in front of me, I have tried, over the years, to reciprocate when I can. Usually I just have camp food, and if I have learned one thing, it is this: no-one on earth likes freeze-dried scrambled eggs.
I do recall a memorable meal I once cooked in Indonesia. I was visiting the Karowai, a clan of Papuans who live in tree houses. Some Karowai groups, especially those who live away from the river, are unaware of the outside world. The group I trekked through the swamp to meet had been contacted only the previous year. My travelling companions and I came upon this group in their tree house and we negotiated with them, standing in clouds of mosquitoes and shouting fifty feet up through the branches.
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