Kari Saraman

The Cham are the Mekong's Muslim community, descendants of the kingdom of Champa who settled the riverbanks around Kampong Cham and Kampong Chhnang over the centuries after their homeland fell — a Middle-Period migration that brought a whole second grammar of spice into Khmer cooking. Kari saraman is their signature: a slow beef curry unmistakably related to Malay and Indonesian massaman and to the Cham dry beef relish serunding, carried up the trade routes on the same tide that carried Islam. It is a wedding dish, a Ramadan dish, a dish cooked halal in a courtyard for a crowd, and it tastes of a Cambodia that is broader than the one the temples advertise. The Khmer Rouge fell especially hard on the Cham; that this curry is still cooked, in the same villages, is not a small thing.

Where Khmer kroeung leans green and wet with lemongrass and lime, saraman goes dry and dark — coriander, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, and clove all toasted first, then pounded into the aromatics. Brown the beef, fry the paste in split coconut cream until the oil rises and the kitchen smells of roasted spice, then add the meat and enough liquid to barely cover and let it go for two hours at the laziest simmer you can hold. The pounded peanuts thicken the sauce to a russet gloss; the whole ones go on top with a last scatter, and the potatoes soak up what the beef gives off. Serve it with rice and the patience it was cooked with.