Cambodia: Kep crab market, just a few steps away

Photos freeze moments in time, words wander through them.

(…) Even kitsch has its charm, and the strings of multicolored seashell decorations don't look out of place in this multicultural market bordering a calm sea. A sea that is actually a bay, Kep Bay, in the Gulf of Siam, part of the vast Pacific Ocean.

This is the epicenter of Kep, its first and most important center, because Kep is a town, a village, which has no center, but enjoys the privilege of having three. No center, but a long history and a short life since it was, fifteen years ago, the first heart to beat again after 30 years of wars that reduced Kep to a pile of stones, bricks, broken tiles, and destroyed roads, to a heap of ashes, earth, and beautiful villas razed to the ground, telling the story of the urgency of the flight, the hasty departures, and the high-speed rush of heavy weapons.

Le month of December is cool here. The ocean breeze fans the coast. We fill our smoker's lungs with iodine. We breathe in armfuls of gentle wind, breathe in the sea air with our salty nostrils. We stroll around in the morning, our heads slightly bowed under the parasols, along the stalls, under the stretched canvas roofs, in the blurry, smoky rays of light.

A place full of life. Entirely full of life. Full of life and flavors, laughter and languor, delights and colors, a place without vices or disfavors, a religious and ethnic melting pot, a space of culinary delights and contagious good humor, with just the right amount of high-pitched voices haggling over prices per kilo, just the right amount of seemingly heated discussions that are really just playful banter, fake seriousness, and repeated jokes, without any turmoil.

There was no center, but rather centers, so Kep was razed to the ground. All the architectural fervor that had caused such a sensation, all those colonial Art Deco houses, in the Indochinese style, inspired by Le Corbusier, in this fishing village, three hundred crazy, brazen shacks, designed by young Khmer architects who had studied in France, were wiped off the fertile land of Kep and Kampot, but not the crab market.

In January 2004, I passed through the ghost town, where the potholed roads were chaotic tracks, and it was under a shabby parasol, around a twisted, warped but still standing iron table, in the early morning light after a sleepless night, facing the mud of the beach at Kep-plus-rien, that I had lunch with friends on a gargantuan seafood platter, drinking beer until I was thirsty no more.

In January 2020, I am back in Phsar Kdam, and it is bustling with life, overflowing with miracles, teeming with blue crabs under the blue-gray sky! Blue crabs, but also mangrove crabs, a kind of big, plump, brown crab with firm flesh and round eyes. Purple shrimp, transparent gray shrimp, soft pink shrimp, almost prawns, shellfish sautéed in red chili woks, and skewers everywhere, delicious skewers everywhere.

Skewers of fish, barracuda, a type of scorpion fish, and divine BBQ skate steaks, accompanied by a tray of immaculate white rice, carefully and sparingly seasoned with a subtle blend of lime, salt, and Kampot pepper, or Phu Coq: a wonderfully simple sauce.

The Cham women, who are Muslim, beautifully veiled, discreetly teasing, or kindly stepmothers, sometimes play the lottery in the quiet of the afternoon, scratch scratch cards, take a siesta in timeless hammocks, but above all work from dawn to sort the night's catch that their husbands have just brought in to sell.

They separate the fish from the shellfish, throw them into a bucket here or a trap there, tie the claws of the crabs caught under the moon to elastic bands and put them back in the baskets, heat up the old cement pots in the kitchens that still run on wood fires, and in which they will cook or boil the day's ocean harvest.

The toughest Mamas are also the most tender cooks, good-natured nannies beneath their tough matriarchal exterior, and, like good Buddhas, they are the driving force and deities of Kep crab sautéed with Kampot pepper in this charming, old-fashioned but not overrated market! (...)

Emmanuel Pezard