Penn’s Villagers met up with our excellent bicultural-bilingual guide Catzie at FDR Park’s Boathouse on a brilliant fall day for a tasting tour of the open-air Cambodian Market (aka SE Asian Market). The vendors had set up their wares in two rows along the banks of the boathouse lake. Their wares included a few stalls of colorful everyday clothes, small toys and trinkets; and then 25-30 food stalls. In the heat of summer there are 69 vendors!

Just as in their countries of origin, men cooked the meat, and women cooked everything else. Elders, women and men alike, did the cooking, as they had grown up with it, so knew from life-time experience how to chop, cut, blend seasonings, what to eat with what, how long and how hot to cook each dish, all without ever having used a recipe. Their taste was the “proof of the pudding.” In many cases, the senior women’s daughters did the selling, as they were more competent in English. 

All were welcoming, generous and cheerful in doling out their delicacies for us to taste, and were delighted with our questions and comments. As we wended through the stalls, grazing on the different tastes, we had sugar cane juice made before our eyes from sugar cane stalks; sampled the rice soup commonly eaten for breakfast from yesterday’s left over rice, and taken as an anti-dote to an evening’s carousing; tried the common snack in SE Asia of raw mango with salt/sugar and chili; and the favorite in our group coconut sticky rice with black beans cooked and served in a bamboo stalk. Then Catzie went her way and we retraced our steps, stopping to buy food to take home or eat at any of the picnic tables in the area.

Alas that was the last market tour of 2022, they will resume once a month when the market re-opens in April 2023.

For more information visit FDRSEAMarket.com