Indochinese Cuisine and the Rich Culture of Fish Sauce
Feb 18,2021
Feb 18,2021
Indochinoise is a two-person team that travels across Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam exploring the traditional cuisine and lifestyles that survive from the days of French Indochina, then showcases them in Japan. It consists of the Japanese duo Tanaka Azusa and Sono Ken.
We caught up with the pair to ask them about their fascination with French Indochinese culture and what they do as a team. They also told us about prahok, padaek, and other fermented foods indispensable to Indochinese cooking.
Since around 2010, Tanaka Azusa and Sono Ken have loved traveling through rural towns in the three countries that once constituted French Indochina. They enjoy experiencing the distinctive lifestyle that evolved under the influence of colonial culture in these balmy southern climes. Their chief destination is the region now comprising Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, which was for many decades — between 1887 and 1954 — a colony under French rule. The spirit of French Indochina that the pair adores survives mainly in the cuisine and lifestyles of areas far from the city like the Mekong basin and the mountains. These areas supply the natural resources with which the people of these countries make their meals and build their homes.
Tanaka Azusa and Sono Ken, who together make up Indochinoise
The pair started operating as a team dubbed “Indochinoise” — the French adjective for Indochinese. Together they explore what used to be French Indochina in all its complexity: its exotic amalgam of cultures, its fertile southern climes, its inimitable elegance in colonial times, and its tragic history.
Currently, Indochinoise mainly engages in offering cooking classes, which are limited to one per day, for a single party. You get to dine to the accompaniment of the pair’s entertaining commentary, surrounded by antique furniture, cooking utensils, and housewares from Indochina selected by the pair for their aesthetic appeal. It’s like a virtual tour across time and space.
Almost all the kitchen utensils were procured locally in Indochina.
What is it about former French Indochina that the pair find so appealing?
“It combines French colonial influence with the culture of the Chinese diaspora,” says Azusa. “Plus it has the kind of culinary culture, natural environment, and laid-back people you only find in southern lands. For us, former French Indochina is so appealing because it has all these things.”
“We’d always wanted to showcase food culture in its broader context, including the specific geographical conditions behind it and its cultural, historical, and political aspects,” says Ken. “That, we thought, meant looking beyond a single country and seeing the bigger picture. That’s what French Indochina is for us.”
Lately, the old culture of French Indochina has been steadily disappearing amid a wave of modernization. The pair were alarmed that the things they loved could soon vanish entirely. They therefore decided to work to preserve that heritage themselves.
“Previously, we figured that we could just visit the region, and we could immerse ourselves in the world we loved,” Azusa explains. “But then we realized that it was disappearing faster than we thought.”
The duo’s trips to the region to explore the legacy of French Indochina last about a month. Often they will set out together from a city accessible by air but then each go their separate ways. They might depart from Phnom Penh in Cambodia, for example. Azusa will then visit the Laotian countryside to learn about the local cuisine, say, while Ken travels to Tonlé Sap Lake in Cambodia to study the food culture of the lake dwellers there. They each have a different goal.
Ken’s trips to Tonlé Sap are an adventure into the wilds. He travels on the lake in a collapsible kayak he brings with him from Japan. In areas where there are no accommodations for foreigners, he stays with the locals or sleeps outdoors.
A floating village on Tonlé Sap Lake, Cambodia
The reason they do field work in remote areas far from the city is because there, the food culture and lifestyles of French colonial days and earlier times still survive.
“Transporting goods to places only accessible by boat is no easy task,” says Ken. “Being logistically cut off from the city, they preserve more of the past. And for some reason, people who live in places like that even retain mannerisms and turns of phrase from a generation earlier. That only increases their appeal.”
Among the Vietnamese who live on Tonlé Sap, not only do old food traditions survive; so too does the custom of setting off firecrackers on Tet (the Lunar New Year), a practice banned in Vietnam itself in 1993 and now obsolete there.
Azusa once accompanied Ken to a floating village to experience the firecrackers on Tet, when a slight mishap occurred.
“It was New Year’s,” Azusa explains, “so everyone was drinking. I was pretty inebriated myself, and like an idiot I fell off the boat into the lake. The owner of the house where we were staying pulled me out of the water, so it was no big deal. But then I thought about it afterwards. Hauling a person out of the water from a house that’s floating on the lake and rocking gently all the time must take considerable strength. After that incident, I had to admire the local people for their impressive physical ability. Almost every day, they eat lots of rice and a little protein. Their diet consists mainly of carbohydrates, yet they’re so lean and muscular. They look so beautiful. Even a mishap on your travels can be a valuable experience.”
There’s a fermented food called prahok that’s made with catfish, snakehead, or tilapia caught in Tonlé Sap. It’s a type of fish sauce in which the fish retain their shape. It comes in many, many different varieties and tastes exceptionally good.
“The reason is that the fish it’s made with is just delicious,” Ken explains. “The water in Tonlé Sap is warmer than that of the Mekong itself, so it’s teeming with aquatic plants, and the microorganism in the water are highly active. For that reason, the fish are completely free of that muddy smell typical of freshwater fish. The lake is inhabited by many different types of fish, and they’re fermented to make fish sauce. There must be more varieties of fish sauce here than anywhere else in the world.”
An example of the Cambodian fish sauce prahok
One quintessentially Cambodian dish is prahok ang. This is made by chopping prahok into small pieces with a knife and wrapping it in banana leaves with coarse-ground pork, then grilling them. It tastes exquisite.
“When making prahok ang, you use three to five parts prahok to ten parts pork,” says Ken. “Generally, fermented seasonings are only used in small amounts, but almost half this entire dish consists of prahok. Using fish sauce not just as a seasoning but also as an ingredient in its own right is one of the traits of Cambodian cuisine.”
Prahok ang, a quintessentially Cambodian dish made by grilling prahok and pork in banana leaves
In Laos, unlike in Cambodia, the Mekong River yields only a relatively small catch of fish. In that country, therefore, fish are fermented whole without removing the head and entrails as in Cambodia. The resulting fish sauce, called padaek, has a bitter flavor from the entrails, which is also delicious in its own way. It’s made from a fish closely related to crucian carp, and it tastes as it does because the fish feeds on plants.
“Padaek tastes very similar to the fish sauce made from the ayu sweetfish caught in the Nagara River in Japan,” Azusa explains. “Both are made from a plant-eating freshwater fish, and the entire fish is turned into a sauce, entrails and all. When making Lao cuisine in Japan, we sometimes use ayu fish sauce from the Nagara River as a substitute for padaek.”
Azusa learning about padaek in a market in Laos
In 2020, the pair came out with their first collection of recipes, entitled The Unique Culinary Culture of French Indochina (in Japanese; published by Shibata Shoten). They’ve thus succeeded in perpetuating the traditions of their beloved French Indochina in print. Recently they haven’t been able to travel to the region because of Covid. But that has only redoubled their love for it.
“We often talk to each other about what lies ahead. What’s going to happen to our favorite restaurants and places and the people we know? After all, one of our topics of research here at Indochinoise is how Indochina will change down the road,” says Azusa.
“When the two of us discuss the future of what used to be French Indochina, our tone tends to get serious,” says Ken. “We’re especially concerned right now about the environmental damage that dam construction on the Mekong River is doing to the river’s basin. After all, it’s an issue that has direct consequences for the traditional culinary culture of the region, including fish sauce.”
Though these are not the best of times, the Indochinoise team remains focused on the wonderful culinary and lifestyle traditions that the local people carry on unchanged today. Their activities as a team and classic cuisine featuring fermented foods from the region give an idea of the allure that French Indochina once had in spades.
A duo that offers cooking classes in Tokyo while exploring the culinary culture and lifestyles of what used to be French Indochina. Photographer Sono Ken focuses particularly on the culinary culture of the Mekong basin. Copywriter Tanaka Azusa studies mainly the classic cuisine of the mountains.
Indochinoise