Grilled Bananas with Wild Forest Honey

The sweets of the highlands are not the elaborate palm-sugar constructions of the plains — up here a dessert is more likely to be fruit, fire, and whatever the forest yielded, and wild honey is the great highland luxury. Mondulkiri's forests still hold wild bee colonies, and gathering their honey is a skilled, sometimes dangerous craft that has fed and provisioned these communities for generations. Poured over bananas grilled black in their skins, that honey turns a scrap of a snack into something worth stopping for. It is a modern, everyday sweet rather than a ceremonial one — the kind of thing a highland cook makes because the coals are still hot and there are bananas in the house and honey in the jar.

The method is almost nothing, which is the charm. Grill the bananas whole and unpeeled until the skins blacken and split — the skin is a free pan that steams and caramelises the fruit from inside while shielding it from the flame. Slit them open hot, and the flesh has turned to gold jam pulling away from its own charred wrapper. Then the honey, poured generously, the toasted sesame, and the pinch of salt that keeps the whole thing from being merely sweet and lets the resin in the forest honey come forward. Coconut cream and lime will gild it if you want a plate for guests, but left plain it is the more honest highland sweet — everything on it came from close to home.