It's 5.30pm and the light from the sun as it sets over the Mekong river is the colour of rich butter. It makes Ssuy Sittha's one-room bamboo hut, which stands on shaky wooden stilts in a grove of sugar palms, look almost lovely. Ssuy Sittha is cooking supper for her three children and their great-aunt. They watch closely as she crouches in her kitchen, a space under the edge of the hut's sagging tin roof.
There is not much gear. A clay bucket on the dried mud floor, fuelled with chunks of wood, is the stove. There are plates, a battered tin saucepan and a kettle. Night falls swiftly here in central Cambodia, just 600 miles north of the equator. There is no mains electricity. But the cooking doesn't take long - there's not much to cook.
Ssuy Sittha has a delicate face, younger than her 37 years; but she looks weary as she carefully measures out half a kilo of white rice. In the pan, she covers the grains with water from the pots that collect rain when it runs off the roof of her hut. She puts a lid on it and, as it starts to simmer, she opens the scewtop of a dirty plastic jar. Inside is a mess of broken, silvery fish, the length of a little finger. She ladles out four, along with some of the salty, brownish liquid in which they've been fermenting for a year or more. This is prahok, the pride of Cambodian cuisine, notorious to visitors as 'Khmer fish cheese'.
She crushes a couple of cloves of garlic and mashes them up with the prahok, adding water and a lump of palm sugar, then takes a pinch of powder from a smaller jar - monosodium glutamate. The sauce is served in the best china, a little bowl with a rose-sprig pattern, hardly bigger than a teacup. There should be chopped chilli in it as well, but Ssuy Sittha says she can't afford to buy any. She drains the rice, saving the water to give to the piglet tied to one of the stilts on which the house stands, then puts on a kettle of green tea to boil.
Supper is ready. A bamboo slat bed is pulled out from under the house and, as the light fades, the family sit on it to eat. Ssuy Sittha ladles rice onto each plate, the biggest portion going to Wan Nut, her eight-year-old son. He looks hardly any bigger than my five-year-old. Wan Nut tears into the rice - munching his way through it in less than a minute. Chantee, 14, Chea, 12, and their great-aunt, 76-year-old Phin Moeng, eat much more daintily. They reach forward in turns to spoon a little of the fermented fish onto their rice, carefully stirring it in. If you're poor in this world, this is how you get your daily energy: a big pile of carbohydrates with a tiny amount of proteins, fats, spice or salt to leaven the stodge.
I take a spoon of the rice, with a dollop of the fish sauce on top. 'Don't smell it!' says the old lady. 'You won't be able to eat it.' Too late. The stench of abandoned gorgonzola makes my head swim. I have to take a gulp of air before I can taste it - and it's not bad, salty-sweet and anchovy-like, a super-strength Gentleman's Relish.
Not bad, but it is all that Ssuy Sittha and her family have eaten for the past three months. There hasn't been enough rainwater to grow any vegetable other than lemon grass since January. It's late May now and we're at the end of the dry season, the leanest time in the precarious life of the poor in Cambodia - one of the poorest countries in east Asia. Here, more than a third of the population lives on less than $1 (60p) a day. Rice is life: 'the blood and sweat of farmers', say the Cambodians. When you say 'let's eat!' in Cambodia, you say 'yam bai' - eat rice. It is not an Atkins sort of place.
Ssuy Sittha has emptied half the rice from her plate onto Wan Nut's. As he hoovers it up I ask what he would really like to eat. He thinks for only a moment. 'Something really delicious. Like some beef!' Everyone laughs. Why? Ssuy Sittha reckons Wan Nut has only eaten beef once in his life, and that was three years ago.
In a month or two, when the rains come and the Mekong river, just a mile or so away, starts its enormous annual rise, then the paddy fields below the house will be full of water again. There will be more to eat with the rice - protein-rich food, like frogs, snails, water beetles and the little fish that swim among the rice seedlings. In this lush place vegetables grow with amazing speed.
But that time is frighteningly far away. Last year's rice harvest was not good: now Ssuy Sittha worries that the sacks of rice from last season's harvest will not see the family through till November, when the new crop will be ready. The family is eating about a kilo of rice a day, but some must be kept for planting. The sacks inside the hut's doorway are dwindling fast.
'I will have to sell the piglet and then I will have to borrow some money,' she says. There aren't many options. A kilo of milled rice costs 1,300 riel - about 20 pence. After the rice harvest last year Ssuy Sittha's husband went to work on building sites in Phnom Penh. Every two months, when he comes home, he hands over his savings. Last time it was 50,000 riel, about £7.
Borrowing against the income that the rain will bring is a normal solution in these villages. But it's dangerous. Village money lenders charge around 10 per cent a month. And bad debt is the most common way for the poor to lose their land. Thus, this family is what the aid agencies call 'chronically food insecure' - lacking the safety nets to see them through the lean period, or guarantee them sufficient nourishment with long-term certainty.
Even now, Ssuy Sittha's family are not getting enough to eat. The poverty line for daily food intake is 2,200 calories. Ssuy Sittha's five-strong family shares a kilo of white rice daily: 3,600 calories in total, barely half of what they need. It's hardly surprising that Wan Nut and his sisters look so small. According to UNICEF, five per cent of Cambodian children suffer from undernourishment and 'stunting'.
The carbohydrate-heavy diet causes other problems in Cambodia and for the 60 per cent or so of the world's population who eat similarly. According to the UN, the average Cambodian energy intake is nine per cent protein, 14 per cent fat and 78 per cent carbohydrate. The British Nutrition Foundation recommends that adults get half their energy from carbs, 35 per cent from fats and 15 per cent from protein. In Cambodia the balance is now better than it has been for 30 years, but still not as good as it was in the 1960s, before the wars: in other words, this is not just a case of poor dietary planning. The imbalance is caused by Cambodia's three decades of death and economic devastation.
The effects are obvious from the aid agencies' statistics. Ssuy Sittha's children are likely to suffer anaemia from lack of iron, poor growth and night blindness, from lack of Vitamin A - which comes from fruit and vegetables. Lack of iodine, which causes mental retardation in children, is another problem. If children's protein intake was doubled in Cambodia, 20,000 lives would be saved each year.
Cambodians are not ignorant of the need for protein in their diet. Every possible source is exploited: no bit of any animal goes uneaten. A couple of days after meeting Ssuy Sittha I munched my way through a bag of grape-sized fried frogs, with an intriguing and delicious stuffing - lemon grass, garlic, chilli and frogspawn. And while insects are cheap and plentiful protein, commonly eaten throughout the region, most Asians are amazed by how far the Cambodians will go.
My copy of The Cuisine of Cambodia (not a long shelf in the cookery section) features recipes for sautéed red ant's eggs and for crickets ('ingredients: four cups water, one tablespoon salt, 30 crickets'), though it suggests you could also serve the crickets in champagne. Tarantulas are another legacy of starvation times, now much sought-after. The roadside vendor who sold me one hairy, palm-sized beast, fried with a sprinkling of garlic chips, for 500 riel (about 15p), told me she didn't eat them herself because they were too expensive.
Rice, if you have enough of it, is a good food. Brown or semi-polished rice is full of useful fibres and it is one of the most 'complex' and mineral-heavy carbohydrates. Rice probably serves the 25 per cent or so of the world's population who depend on it better than do the starchy porridges made from maize, wheat, cassava and yams that are the other major staple of the poor, particularly in Africa and South America.
And, to Western palates at least, rice tastes better. I've tried variants of the African porridges, like ugali or fou-fou, all across tropical Africa. The taste is of stale water with a texture somewhere between used chewing gum and window putty.
The proportion of carbohydrate in a diet is a pretty clear indicator of whether you're rich or poor. Meat and two veg is a rich person's dish: the protein comes with a bit of carbohydrate on the side. In the poor world, the main event is the carbohydrate - the cassava, maize, wheat or rice (the last three crops provide 60 per cent of the world's energy intake) - with, if you're lucky, a bit of meat or fish on the side. In poor Europe, bread or potatoes with a bit of fat or, nowadays, instant noodles, does the same job. Only seven per cent of the average African diet, measured as energy intake, is animal product. This makes economic sense, of course. The carbohydrate-heavy crops are a far more efficient way of turning labour into energy than raising meat is - famously, it takes 10,000lbs of corn to grow a 1,000lb cow. But it needs to be balanced with fats and proteins, first to be healthy, but also to make what we rich people seek (obsessively, in some cases) - an interesting, varied diet.
But does everyone want what we think of as an interesting diet? Is there a foodie lurking inside everyone who has to struggle to fill their belly? A pretty clear answer to that question is available 100 yards or so from Ssuy Sittha's shack. Just past the pagoda, by the mud road that runs through the village, we find a rather different meal being prepared.
Against a wall of the pagoda compound, a massive temporary kitchen has been built. Under five sawn-off oil barrels fierce wood fires are burning: on top of them are the woks of giants, each as wide as I can stretch my arms. In one, heaps of peanuts are being roasted, turned by a spatula the size of a spade. In another a dozen withered leather handbags are slowly stewing - pigs' stomachs, apparently. A beefy Cambodian is stripped to the waist, shiny with sweat, as he throws strips of translucent dried buffalo hide into a wok full of seething oil. These bubble and puff up in a second or two and he hoiks them out to drain: buffalo scratchings.
These are the preparations for the wedding feast for Sem Kamsort and Pum Solida, to be held tomorrow. Kamsort, the bridegroom, is watching nervously. As is the custom, all his savings have gone into this: 'I am very afraid that we will not make money if people do not come.' He's catering for 350, under a tinsel-hung awning in front of his in-laws stilt house, and the food and drink alone have cost him £300.
This is a traditional gamble. The bridegroom invests everything he has in the wedding and invites everyone - all his friends, relatives, the neighbours. Then he hopes that the wedding present money that people bring will pay him back, even put him in profit. Ssuy Sittha earlier told us she was very excited at the prospect of the feast. She'd be expected to give 10,000 riel, £1.50, as a present. That is a lot of money - five day's wages for a paddy-field worker - but it looks like being a historic blow out. Six courses and all the Klang beer you can drink.
Chheng Lim Thung, the head chef, presides over the woks, a fag in one hand and a glass of rice wine in the other. Thung is the hardest chef I've ever seen - stringy and whiskery, like a lean Charles Bronson. Waving away clouds of flies, he shows us round his kitchen. He's got nine staff with him. Two are busy preparing the 59 ducks and 15 chickens the wedding feast requires. Every ounce of the birds is being used - the gizzards are sliced for a soup; the livers will go into a mushroom, bamboo shoot and squid stew; the feet, breasts and skulls of the ducks will be roasted and served with cassava chips and a peppery dipping sauce. Even the yellowy contents of the birds' stomachs are scraped out for use in flavouring a stock.
Another cook is working through a four-kilo sack of squid, slicing the flesh with a machete. The squid, I'm told, is expensive. We are, indeed, a long way from the sea, and the only cooling available is in the form of blocks of ice that arrive strapped on the back of an old Honda moped.
Three people, aided by a little girl, are julienning vegetables into huge heaps bigger than she is - there's radish, carrot, cabbage, green papaya, peppers, shallot, coriander, lemon grass, red chilli and garlic. These will go into a raw beef salad, the meat marinated in fish sauce and lime juice and the whole lot served on a bed of crispy fried noodle. Perhaps Wan Nut will get to try beef at last.
There is something familiar about this food. I live in Bangkok, and it's the standard Cantonese food that we get in Chinese cafes. Thung, the chef, agrees. 'It is Chinese food. I offer Khmer dishes, but people want Chinese. It's seen as more sophisticated.' So in Bareach village, at least, we found that not only do Cambodians like a many-course blow out like anyone else in the world, they are also food snobs.
Later, Thung tells me why he became a chef. In 1975 he was a law student in Phnom Penh, but when the Khmer Rouge, with their avowed hatred of anyone educated, were advancing on the city, his wife told him he must go into hiding. So he changed his name and became a cook. What happened to the other law students? 'More died than I can count,' said Thung. He went to sleep that night on the table of the tent-kitchen, just in case anyone tried to steal the food.
The wedding begins just after dawn the next day, with a procession to Solida's family house: Kamsort, in a vast double-breasted suit, his ushers and his family coming to beg her father for her hand. Kamsort's companions all carry food - rambutan, bananas, lychees, mangosteen and the num rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves traditional to the Khmer wedding ceremony, full of sexual connotations. Some people carried slabs of raw pork, some had bottles of Fanta or tins of Chinese-manufactured biscuits called Great! At the house, the groom meets the bride - her hair lacquered into an enormous beehive, a spray of pearls emerging from one side of it, six roses from the other.
As the rising sun heats the house, we watch the ceremony. Led by a Buddhist lay preacher, it is laden with images, chiefly about food and fertility. The bride is likened to a rice stalk, the man to the water that must flood her so she will be fruitful. The village elders have to be satisfied that the groom has brought the bride no less than 36 different types of food that he has been able to gather: evidence that he has the skills to look after her - hence the food carried by the procession. The elders taste the fruit to see if it is sweet. At the end of the sermon the ancestors of the house are invited to come and eat.
And eat we do. Thung's cooks start to relay the dishes from the woks to the space under the awning. The centrepiece of each table is a bottle of Fanta, nestling in a cluster of Klang beer cans. As soon as one feasting group has stood up, full, their chairs are taken by another. It takes five hours for all Thung's food to be gone. By then the uncle who has manned the entrance, taking the gift money from the guests, has bricks of riel notes. Kamsort, now dressed as a Khmer King, looks relieved. Solida, in her fourth frock and fourth high-rise hairdo, looks exhausted. There's one last ritual before the dancing starts - a Western wedding cake, three tiers high. The band plays the first four notes of Here Comes the Bride.
I sit with Eang Pak, the bride's grandfather. In his youth, he says, weddings were better - three days and two nights, minimum. 'And we drank good rice wine - a lot of it!,' he said, gesturing with contempt at the Klang, which tastes like Special Brew.
Once, not so long ago, the Chinese had a phrase 'As rich as Cambodia'. The country their merchants knew was lush, fertile and comfortable. I asked Eang Pak if things had changed for the better during his life. He is 75, so he has lived through the famines, the Vietnamese occupation, the American bombing, and the three years in the Seventies when the Khmer Rouge killed perhaps two million people, nearly a sixth of the population. 'It was better in my youth,' said Eang Pak. And then he repeated what Ssuy Sittha's aunt had said in reply to the same question. 'When I was young, the weather was more settled.'
At first I thought this was metaphorical, a nugget of Oriental wisdom, but my interpreter said the old people meant it. When you live on the floodplain of a great river, the stability of the weather is of life-changing importance. Here in Kandal province, the Mekong is vast. It will rise dozens of feet in the rainy season. Unsettled weather can mean a rice crop washed away, and a house and vegetable garden with it. If the floods come late, or not at all, there will be drought. Dams in China and logging in Thailand and Burma, have changed the Mekong. It was, for millennia, a reliable provider. Now it is dangerous, potentially lethal - more so, perhaps, than the armies who fought over Cambodia.
Towards the end of the feast we go to see Ssuy Sittha and her family. They hadn't appeared at the feast, not even at the end of the afternoon after the smart guests had eaten their fill and the poorer families arrived. We'd given her enough money, we thought, to pay the wedding gift fee. We found the children playing around the shack, having eaten their rice. Ssuy Sittha was vague when we asked her if she was going. 'I think she would like to,' said our interpreter, after we left. 'But she doesn't have anything nice to wear.'
