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Mixed Fresh Fruit (Bai Dom Neub Song Chien)

I’m not much of an adventure eater. I’ll eat what might taste good. I’ll eat what I’m served. At my age, I don’t really need to eat on a dare. That being said, I’ve had a few misadventures in eating these past few days.

For my first lunch in Cambodia, I ended up in some random spot, Master Food, ordering a big bowl of noodles with fatty beef chunks. On the soft drink menu, somewhere in between shakes and juices, was “mixed fresh fruit,” which I mistakenly took to be a mixed fruit shake, a common hot-day refresher in Southeast Asia. Instead of a shake, a mysterious bowl was set down on my table, and my server reading the confusion on my face repeated “number 5, number 5,” referring to the number I definitely had ordered. So here it was, some dessert bowl of delicately carved dragon fruit, carrots, apples, and starchy roots swimming in a white milky liquid and topped off with a heavy dose of Ovaltine powder. It wasn’t what I had envisioned, but it was in front of me now and I might as well have it. I slowly started spooning up mouthfuls. It turns out that there was a raw egg yolk in the center as well. Okay, it’s not bad. Or not bad until I hit on some odd fruit that released some really strange juices that made the entire bowl taste like something had turned. I chugged some water and signed for the check.

One night after finding nothing of interest to eat in the night market, I ended up at a little restaurant that served two things – eggs and bowls of shaved ice with coconut milk and chopped fruit. Although I’ve been running around Thailand consuming anything in sight, I’ve heard the water situation is different in Cambodia and some of the ice might be unsettling for a foreigner. I only wanted to try the egg, which I’ve seen people eating all over, but ended up with both dishes. I was a little hesitant to try the dessert, but decided to go for it anyway while waiting for the egg.

The egg with a side plate of mixed salt and pepper, lime wedges and herbs. I started tapping at the top of the egg and as the shell broke some blackish liquid seeped out. Okay, maybe this was one of those fermented eggs I’d read about. I squeezed in some lime juice. Working my spoon in I pulled out a very hard white. I couldn’t even break it with the spoon edge so I set it aside and started in on the rest. The yolk was softer and quite salty. All around fine. I chewed on some of the herbs and added more lime. Dipping in again, I pulled up something distinctly past the egg stage – a tiny bird head with a beak attached to a small gray body. There was no turning back now. I hastily put down the baby bird and the rest of the shell’s watery black contents. Surprisingly, nothing was feathery or hard; instead it was soft and again very salty. I looked down at the empty egg shell and then over at the dessert bowl of potentially-unsafe ice. I wasn’t sure what I should be more afraid of.

I decided I needed to cover up these scary foods with something else so I headed off. On my way to another restaurant, I found out from the guys at my hotel’s front desk that what I had just eaten was phong tea kon or baby duck egg, a popular Cambodian dish. The duck eggs are typically set aside for 21 days, assumingly to bring it to a certain stage of gestation, before its steamed and then sold in the markets. Now that I knew all this, I headed off for the restaurant they recommended. As I sat there waiting for my beer and amok, I swear something fluttered in my stomach.

Phong Tea Kon (Baby Duck Egg)