Taking Cambodia's Banned Street Food To The UK

An article I wrote for the British Street Food Awards 2012...

At the British Street Food Awards, we like to think that we know our business. Check out our knowledge of world street food HERE. But we don’t know everything. Alex Watts does. The travelling journalist, and sometime chef, writes the food blog CHEF SANDWICH – and we’re huge fans. So when he offered to write us an atmospheric piece about a side to world street food we hadn’t seen first hand, we jumped at the chance.

WALK DOWN any road in Cambodia, and you’ll see street food – sometimes an ingenious bicycle-driven cart hooked up to a car battery, sometimes a stall with a few plastic chairs to perch on.

There are old women pushing barrows of freshwater clams that are slowly ‘cooked’ on a metal tray in the morning sun for an hour or two, baguette stalls (a hangover from French imperialists) serving Cambodia’s version of the banh mi, and sometimes hawkers flogging local delicacies like fried tarantula, bugs, snakes and duck foetuses.

But the most memorable – and easily the best for my money – has to be the spit-roast cows (koo dut) you see being slowly cooked in the street next to crowds of tooting mopeds. The hunks of grilled veal are always served the same way, with a tray of crudités, salt, pepper and lime dip, and Cambodia’s fermented fish ‘cheese’ prahok.

I’m so impressed with the dish, I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a ‘koo dut’ street food stall when I get back to the UK. I’m not sure how it would take off, and I know I’ll have more chance of getting hold of a Dodo egg in Blighty than prahok. But I reckon hunks of spit-roast calf would go down well on an English common with the sound of leather on willow and the chink of warm beer glasses.

In readiness, I’ve worked on a couple of koo dut stalls to watch how they do it – starting the day by butchering and washing the carcass, and then filling the belly with lemon grass, lime leaves and rice paddy herbs before sewing up the cavity. And then constantly feeding the coals as the beast slowly spit-roasts for hours.

Of course, I know I’ll be facing far more stringent street food regulations in the UK, and will have to fill out forms giving details of everything from my inside leg measurement to the name of the calf before the council offers me a pitch. But there’s one ludicrous law that recently came in over here that I won’t have to worry about.

The Cambodian government, in its wisdom, has banned restaurants and stalls from spit-roasting cows in public – over claims they incite violence and are bad for the image of Cambodia. It follows a meeting by the Supreme Council of the Mohanikaya Buddhist order, which decided the sight of roasting carcasses glorifies the killing of animals.

Other officials cited hygiene concerns about cooking in the street, which is ridiculous when you see the state of many indoor kitchens here, and the dozens of busy food stalls perched on every corner.

I’m delighted to say that so far the ban has been widely ignored with barbecued cows still on display in the capital Phnom Penh and in the tourist hub of Siem Reap.

But however much it is against Buddhist sensibilities, I think it’s a shame if the government does enforce the ban. It would undoubtedly lead to a lot of restaurants and stalls closing, and a lot of families being plunged on to the bread line.

The government should be showcasing these dishes, and promoting the country’s badly-marketed cuisine, rather than ordering them to be swept off the streets. Perhaps if there is a major crackdown, a koo dut stall in England wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all…

UPDATE: Sadly, the Cambodian government got tough with restaurants flouting the ban, and threatened to close them down. Now you won't see a spit-roast calf on display anywhere in Cambodia (they're being cooked in kitchens and yards at the back). The only koo dut advertising allowed is on beer signs like the one below. Mmmm beer. Now that never causes violence does it.

MORE: Ten Days In Cambodia: Street Food, Spit Roasts And Freshly Boiled Crabs

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Vietnam: The Land Of Sandwiches

I used to know a lot about horse racing, but never quite enough to make any money at it. I studied the form, and threw bricks into the dewy turf to test the going each morning, and unwrapped blankets around steaming Lancashire hotpots in the back of my beaten-up old Land Rover in the hope of luring tips from passing insiders. At one point, I even found myself driving to King’s Cross some evenings to buy the next day’s racing papers.

It was quite sad really.

Like I say, I never really got anywhere with racing. But the one thing I did learn is that what you eat at the races says a lot about the food of the country you’re in. I’m not talking about private dining tables and Royal enclosures; I’m talking about the soul food, the comfort food, the snacks of choice - the stuff eaten in the cheaper silver-ring and grandstand enclosures, where 90% of punters go.

You say Kentucky Derby to race-goers and they’ll have the taste of American mustard and fried onions in their mouths, Melbourne Cup and it’ll be the meaty gravy of that ‘proper Aussie pie’ they keep droning on about in ever-ascending sentences, Fairyhouse and it will no doubt be the fatty, breadcrumby taste of disturbingly pink sausages, and Royal Ascot, and it’ll be the tang of smoked salmon, moistening away nicely at the back of the throat with the heavily-buttered brown bread.

But given the overwhelming evidence at Saigon Race Track – one of the very few places in the country that the Vietnamese can legally gamble - the snack of choice here is the sandwich. Alright, there were a couple of stands selling noodles – you can’t go anywhere in this place without falling over a fucking noodle stand – but it’s definitely the sandwich.

Or the banh mi, or bread roll, as it’s known here. A stumpy baguette filled with anything from tinned mackerel in tomato sauce to Laughing Cow cheese to eggs to a few cold cuts and a smear of dubious pate (don’t ask), and always with salad, herbs, sauces, pickles, and a generous scattering of chopped red chillies, that is easily now the most popular form of Vietnamese fast food, overthrowing the traditional pho noodle soup.

I apologise in advance, if I appear obsessive about sandwiches. I wrote an unpublished book on the weighty subject in my hopeful, naive 20s, and have always been fascinated by their history, and the cheerful, parcel-like comfort they offer.

Sandwiches were obviously made well before a hungry John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, ordered an idle butler to stick some meat between two slices, and to hurry up about it, because he didn’t want to waste valuable gambling time leaving the card table. Barbarians were no doubt chucking slabs of rhino between unleavened, fire-baked bread thousands of years before that.

I mean it’s hard to accept that man had invented the printing press before the complexities of the filled bap. But if you do go with it, and say it was Lord Sandwich who invented what we now regard as the sandwich in its modern form, then it makes an interesting journey from his stamping ground in Kent to Saigon Race Track 6,357 miles away in Ho Chi Minh City.

The British statesman made them fashionable, there were rosbif ripples in France, and then finally an uncomfortable acceptance of this entirely new food form that no-one had ever seen or heard of before (obviously with the word ‘le’ wedged before ‘sandwich’ in a typically Franco attempt to save pride, rather than a shoulder-shrugging, philosophical favor that it was just another nail in the coffin of the French language).

Parisians started filling baguettes with pates, and jambon and butter, perhaps with a few cornichons on the side for sharpness and colour, then came brie and squished tomatoes with lots of pepper and sea salt, and then as happened in Britain’s former colonies, France started exporting sandwiches through its empire like rats from ships.

The French took their flour over to Saigon and showed their Vietnamese servants how to make baguettes, and then finally – almost 120 years after the death of John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich - the banh mi was borne. And it’s amazing to think that no-one would have ever invented it, if it hadn’t been for a British aristocrat, whose epitaph should have read "seldom has any man held so many offices and accomplished so little", according to his many critics.

Yes, they embraced the sandwich in Vietnam. And some might say Lord Sandwich has got a lot to answer for, because it shows in the diet. The Vietnamese tend to be much more rotund than their Cambodian and Thai neighbours. Men happily flop their guts out, and lounge around, scratching their balls, counting down the hours till their wives get home from work and they’ve got more money for sandwiches.

And every restaurant menu has its own comprehensive sandwich section, sat awkwardly in a no-man’s land between Western dishes and Vietnamese dishes, like some sort of oil-rich archipelago in the South China Sea, or Eastern Sea if you live in Vietnam, being fought over by two mutually-respecting, but diametrically-opposed culinary rivals.

I even saw a ‘Chef Sandwich’ for sale in one place, and I can only wonder at the uniqueness of the person’s mind that came up with those fillings, let alone the name. Ham, grilled chicken, camembert, black olives, mayonnaise, lettuce, onion, and tomato. Even at $5 - two day’s pay for many people out here - I had to order one, and was soon mopping milky liquid from the melted camembert with a handy baguette.

When I asked, they said it was created by an English chef who’d left the country a few years ago. I don’t know if he was from Kent. But it would be nicely fitting to say he was...and that he’d set up a banh mi stall in Margate or something.

But they don’t deal with outlandish pomp like that at Saigon Race Track, they serve sandwiches the traditional way - a smear of pate, like home-made chicken liver pate but without the fuss, rolled pork belly slices, white sausage, and other things they produce from somewhere in the cart. And then comes the salad - onion, lettuce, tomato and long strips of leathery cucumber, chopped red chillies, mayonnaise and ketchup, and who knows what else crammed in, pushed together, and wrapped in computer print-out paper fastened with elastic bands as though it’s been handed over by a hopper in The Wire.

Or maybe a breakfast banh mi? Two eggs beaten in a bowl, with a little water - the key to any decent omelette. Not that they’re making an omelette as such, as there’s no gooeyness. Instead, they pour a little vegetable oil into a wok and fry the eggs until they have the texture and colour of a shammy leather.

It could be a very ordinary dish, but they add a scattering of sliced onions to the oil before they put the eggs in, and this gives it that sort of big-race, hotdog smell, except without the testacles and colouring, and you’re back at that race course, anywhere in the world, screaming along with the crowd as the horses hit the 1,100 metres pole and the hotdog or the burger or the taco or the kebab or the naan or the SANDWICH is falling out of your hands, and the mustard is already down your shirt, and it’s neck and neck, and your horse finally comes in and the whole afternoon’s saved, and you know you’ve got the money to buy another 10 hotdogs. Or 189 banh mi if you’re in Vietnam.