Why I hate Cambodian kitchens

Years and years of living with my grandma (twenty one to be exact), have created a lot of tension when it comes to a common ground on how to operate our kitchen. For one, I was born and raised in a Western culture where Martha Stewart’s diction over homemaking was the holy word and grandma comes from a society that exists on the other end of the spectrum. After researching roots of Cambodian food and culture, I came to an appalling conclusion of why grandma has so many “bad” habits.

1.There are no ovens.

I can’t even explain how many times my grandma begins to get a heart attack every time I start to bake something in the oven. In her mind, she envisions the sound of gas seeping from the oven doors with a loud hiss as an explosion blows the house to pieces. It’s a thorn to my side that I can’t rid but something I have a better understanding of now. Cambodian food is either in the form of a soup, fried, or grilled. The idea of an oven or even the familiarity of one is obsolete. This is one of the reasons why many Cambodian’s assimilation to the U.S. is a bit hard to grasp at first and why the oven is used to store your pots and pans.

2.MSG is the way to be.

There are many reasons why MSG is preferred over Mrs. Dash when seasoning food. It’s fast, cheap, and will never fail you. Though modern day health warnings liken us to cringe at it, history explains the reasons behind the food and its infamous seasoning. For one, Cambodia was and still is haunted by the Khmer Rouge that left 2 million murdered, thousands dead through starvation, and many scarred about the genocide. My grandma often tells me stories about not having anything to eat and how she sacrificed her meals to feed her children. With that in mind, the idea of cooking doesn’t really focus on creating cuisine, but rather a meal to fill the gnawing pain of hunger. Now that I’ve scared you, it would be wise to add that my grandma does not cook with MSG anymore. Instead, she opts for the MSG-free seasoning that I force her to buy.

3.No storage

If the image of a group of Westerners bustling out of Costco with a load of food is what you’re used to, you won’t find that in Cambodia. In fact, the average Cambodian only buys enough food for the day, making no need for a pantry in the kitchen. Hoarding is not a common cultural trait and many only make enough for a days worth of meals. Though my grandma has been in the U.S. for nearly thirty years now, I still find myself taking her to the market four times a week. She’ll get the hand of it eventually.

4.No technology
Want to know a secret? Cambodians still prepare their meals with a pestle and mortar. Y’know the same on Jesus himself probably used. The lack of technological advance and progress can attribute to this. Even if I brought home a food processor, my grandma would still use a pestle and mortar. In reality, it is quite a handy tool to have in the kitchen. It grinds up your solids, crushes peanuts, mixes ingredients together, creates purees, you name it, it probably does it.

I understand that grandma has been in the U.S for nearly thirty years but her cooking and kitchen habits have remained unchanged. These aren’t really bad habits but a way of culture that sets a foundation for the story behind the meals, MSG or not ;).