On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. Within days, the city had been evacuated — two million people, pushed out into the countryside. My grandmother was twenty-six years old. She had grown up in Phnom Penh, the youngest daughter of a family who ran a restaurant near the Tonle Sap River. She knew how to cook. She was very good at it.
She did not tell anyone this for the next four years. Under the Khmer Rouge, skilled professionals — teachers, doctors, civil servants, anyone with education or expertise — were targeted. The regime's project was the destruction of existing society and the construction of a new agrarian order. Knowledge, in this context, was a liability. My grandmother kept hers to herself. She worked in the rice fields. She said nothing about what she knew.
The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979 — nearly four years. Estimates of those who died in that period vary, but historians widely accept approximately 1.5 to 2 million people — perhaps a quarter of the country's entire population — killed through execution, forced labour, starvation, and disease. My great-grandfather was executed in 1976. Two of my grandmother's brothers did not survive. She herself survived, which she never fully explained and seemed to find, in some way, a burden.
The Vietnamese forces entered Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979. The regime fell. The city, emptied for four years, began slowly to refill. My grandmother walked back in from the countryside with nothing. She found her family's house occupied. She slept on the floor of a building that had been a school.
That week, she made fish amok.
She has told this story carefully over the years — not often, and always with the same specific details. She found galangal and lemongrass growing at the edge of the city. She found a fish in the river. She had no banana leaves and used a broad-leafed plant she foraged instead. She had no steamer and improvised one from a pot and some wire. The kroeung paste she made by hand with a stone she found in the rubble. When it was done, she ate it alone, sitting in the ruins of what had been her city, and she cried — not, she said, from sadness, but from the feeling of recognition. That she was still herself. That four years of hiding had not erased what she knew.
Fish amok is considered by many Cambodians to be the national dish — the dish that most purely represents Khmer culinary identity. The kroeung paste at its heart is a fragrant combination of lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, kaffir lime zest, garlic, and shallots. The word "amok" refers specifically to the steaming technique — the fish or other protein is combined with coconut milk and egg, poured into banana leaf cups, and steamed until it sets to something between a mousse and a light custard. It is a delicate, considered dish. It requires knowledge. My grandmother had carried that knowledge through four years of regime and silence, and when she was finally alone and safe, she made it.
She is eighty years old now. She lives with my mother in Phnom Penh, in a neighbourhood that was rebuilt after the regime fell. She taught me this recipe when I was twelve, the same age she was when she first learned it from her own mother. She was very precise about the kroeung paste — the order of pounding, the amount of galangal, the kaffir lime zest from the skin rather than the leaves. At the end of the lesson, she said one thing I have never forgotten: "Now you know it too. Don't forget it."
