The kitchen table

This trail starts at the kitchen tables of Khmer families abroad: a grandmother's soup in a picture book, a Cambodian chef in San Francisco and a fish amok pie in Australia. It goes back to the pastes, ferments and noodles of Cambodia, to royal recipes compiled and taught in the 1960s, and ends with a chef in Phnom Penh restoring cooking knowledge lost in the Khmer Rouge years.

8 stops · Living memory trail

Start at stop 1: Cooking with Yey: Salaw Machu KroeungFollow in the Explorer

Illustration inspired by a Khmer family kitchen: kroeung pounded in a stone mortar, with prahok and sour soup.

Here

1. 1

   Cooking with Yey: Salaw Machu Kroeung

   A boy helps his grandmother cook a sour soup, and the cooking carries her back to her hometown in Cambodia, where the recipe comes from.

2. 2

   Nite Yun

   Raised in Stockton, she runs a Cambodian restaurant in San Francisco; her cookbook centers on prahok and kroeung, two essentials of Cambodian cooking.

3. 3

   Fish Amok

   Chan and Ryan Khun turned their mother's fish amok into a barramundi pie filling, and the pie won Best Pie in Australia.

There

4. 4

   Kroeung

   The pounded paste of lemongrass, makrut lime, galangal and turmeric that begins the grandmother's soup and many other Khmer dishes.

5. 5

   Prahok

   Fish and salt, fermented to keep fish through the year: the paste at the heart of Khmer cooking, traditionally made from a small mud carp.

6. 6

   Num Banh Chok

   Fresh rice noodles in a fish gravy, found in every province, many with their own version, with rice and prahok among its essential ingredients.

Then

7. 7

   SAOY: Royal Cambodian Home Cuisine

   Recipes compiled and taught in the 1960s by Princess Norodom Rasmi Sobbhana, who supervised the table at the Royal Palace, reinterpreted by Chef Nak.

Now

8. 8

   Chef Nak

   A Phnom Penh chef reviving home and royal cooking, part of an effort to restore knowledge lost in the Khmer Rouge years; the family recipes at the start share that work.

Cambodian restaurants and bakeries are listed in the directory.