Green Blog: Mother Water, Fish Water

If you?ve been following the tale of our family quest down the Mekong River, this thought may have occurred to you: traveling long days in a small boat with two children is not a dream vacation. This thought also occurred to me ? quite regularly around midnight during many sleepless nights before our departure. I would lie awake listening to our old cat scamper around the house and contemplate the many ways things could go badly ? very badly ? from sibling takedowns to dengue fever.

I?m not sure what it says about me, but it wasn?t the social or educational merits of the trip that calmed my racing mind, but thoughts of the strange, intense and wonderful food I remembered from two years in the Peace Corps. Like a Buddhist chant, ?my recitation would begin: thick noodles with water spinach, fried eggs with mussels, pureed and deep-fried catfish with green mango salad, hard-boiled eggs with tamarind sauce, boiled rice soup with pork and ginger, green papaya salad with fermented crab ?. And eventually, sleep would come. The trip might be hell, but I would eat well.

With the river charting our path, we alternated between small villages and larger cities, some bustling with tourists, and our food choices varied accordingly. Some evenings our meals were crafted by chefs in state-of-the-art kitchens combining hundreds of years of tradition with modern techniques.? Other nights, the wife of the village head man cooked four or five local specialties on a single wood-fired stove, with ingredients gathered, grown or ?caught near a ragtag outpost of houses on stilts.

Along the Mekong, both village food and high cuisine revolve around fish, which is eaten in all shapes and sizes from small fry to huge catfish. In fact, the cornerstone of cooking in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries is nam plah, or fish sauce, an amber liquid made from fermented fish and salt that, if you?ve ever tried it, tastes like a fishy version of soy sauce. ?Nam plah translates literally to ?fish water,? reflecting the fact that, in Thai and Lao, short words are yoked together to create new words and complex meanings: ??car stopped? (traffic), ?broken stomach? (diarrhea) and, appropriately for the focus of our trip, me nam or ?mother water? (river).

Before you wrinkle your nose at fermented fish: if you?ve ever eaten Thai food, then you?ve definitely had fish sauce because it?s an ingredient in every Thai dish other than dessert. (Apologies to all strict vegetarians who thought their tofu curry was aboveboard.)

While most fish sauce is made from the seafaring anchovy, vast quantities are produced in Cambodia from the trey riel, a type of small, silvery fish harvested from the great floodplain lake of Tonle Sap, where we were slowly but surely headed. The harvested fish are scaled, washed, strained and placed in jars with salt. The mixture ferments for about a year, with the fish exposed periodically to the sun.

Despite its unusual origins, fish sauce is a relatively accessible flavor. Even in the far reaches of suburban Cleveland, it?s emerging as the new small-batch, handcrafted ?it? girl of high-end cuisine?.? After we returned to Ohio, we ate at a local Italian restaurant and tried an unusual stew of manila clams and rabbit with an even more surprising finishing ingredient: bourbon-barrel-aged fish sauce. ?This fish sauce is aged in barrels that first held bourbon and then maple syrup to create an unexpected fusion of East and West.

But back in Southeast Asia, various other fermented fish products like fish paste, or plah rah, are decidedly more challenging to the Western palate. In the river towns of Laos, we explored the warren-like food markets, where amid the color wheel of spices, the carcasses and the fantastical fruit are bins upon bins of fish products of various colors, levels of pastiness, and degree of fermentation. (Explore this slideshow). While my kids devoured the fruit and most other foods, these pastes were well past their threshold for exotic flavors.

The popularity of fish sauce and fish paste in Southeast Asian cuisine exerts a surprisingly important influence on the overall fish harvest from the Mekong. In some parts of the world, small fish are deemed unworthy. But here, small fish are the raw material for fish sauces and paste, so fishermen continue their intense efforts even as the big fish become rare. Because all big fish start small, this drive for small fish, made effective by the fine mesh nets used all along the river, hinders the recovery of the large fish for which the Mekong is known.

My fears about things going wrong along the trip did not materialize. The days passed in an easy rhythm of travel, despite the relentless pace downriver. We spent hours playing cards, while gliding past sandy banks and dark chevrons of jungle that pushed against the river?s edge. ??We were healthy (only one bout of broken stomach), the kids mostly got along, and our time on the river was quite amazing.

When sleeping in villages, I still found myself up at night, with our solitary old cat replaced by a legion of yowling cats that became a consistent nighttime motif. I am amazed by what the villagers can sleep through ? a distant cousin stumbling in late after a night of rice whiskey, dogs growling, cats consummating and roosters just being roosters ? at literally any time of night.

I would pull my kids close ? we were relegated to a large family bed for most of our village stays ? and take in their soft, even breaths. While I fought to keep them out of my bed when they were toddlers, they are now 8 and 10, and I secretly enjoyed the chance to feel them next to me. Much of this stretch of the Mekong hasn?t changed in the past 20 years, but it will ? and so will they. ?I?d think about breakfast and drift off?.

Source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/mother-water-fish-water/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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