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Boiled Chicken Over Rice with Tamarind Sauce

Kompong Trach, Cambodia – We drove for about an hour and a half in a compact red car that was having some engine issues, first creeping along paved roads and then bouncing across narrow dirt roads that cut through rice paddies. Sok Lim, the field operator for FarmLink and my translator for the day, was bringing me to some pepper farms in Kompong Trach to meet the farmers and check out the fields. After a long morning spent baking under the hot sun in the fields, a husband-wife team of farmers invited us for lunch under a thatched hut in the field.

While his wife, Leng Sopat, began building the fire, Ngoun Lee set off on a protein mission returning about 30 minutes later with a live chicken in hand. While Leng Sopat was busy plucking feathers, boiling rice, mashing tamarind and boiling water, he cleared a fertilizer wheelbarrow off and rolled it into the shade for a small group of male farmers to sit on. Ngoun Lee had told me earlier that Khmer Rouge fighters were still hiding out in the Phnom Voa mountain. “Are you worried still,” I asked through Sok Lim. Sometimes when the birds are startled, I will the leave the fields, he said. I could see the Phnom Voa mountain in the distance, far, but not that far, rising above the valley, dark, green and still.

Lunch was ready. We each served ourselves, first rice, then chicken with vegetables in broth and finally a wonderfully acidic little sauce of fresh tamarind smashed with chiles and salt. There was no pepper in this pepper farm lunch, but the chicken was fine and fresh and the sour tamarind sauce swept me off my feet. The farmers laughed as I went in for thirds on the sauce alone asking them what was in it and how it was made. They were so amused that they later sent the neighbor’s boy 20-feet up into a tamarind tree to pluck a bag of the fruit for me. I just sat sipping out of a fresh coconut praying that he wouldn’t fall off a tamarind tree on my account.