Name: Bok L’hong
Yield: A Tongue-Tickling Side Dish or Starter for 4
Cuisine: Cambodia
Ingredients: 75 g/2¾ oz/½ cup unsalted but roasted peanuts, roughly chopped; 2 tsp.soft brown sugar; juice of 2 limes; 1 tbsp toasted sesame oil; 1–2 red (bird’s eye) chillies, destalked; 4–5 anchovies (authentically shrimp paste, but anchovies make a fine substitute)**; 1 tbsp fish sauce; 1 medium green papaya (use an unripe mango if you really can’t find papaya), peeled; 1 fat carrot, peeled; 4 garlic cloves, peeled; 100 g/3½ oz green beans, topped and tailed and cut into 5–6 cm/2–2½ in.pieces; big handful of fresh coriander (cilantro), chopped

Preparation info

A Tongue-Tickling Side Dish or Starter for
4

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Salmagundi

By Sally Butcher

Published 2014

About

There’s a lot going on in this salad: the first time I made it and plonked it in front of my mostly unappreciative guinea pigs*, they were hard put to identify what they were eating – but they did finish it with relish, which is always a relief. It’s got sweet, sour, salty, crunchy, bitter, umami – and for this reason, I like to serve it as a starter rather than an accompaniment, but it is most often eaten as street food in Laos and Cambodia (us