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Food in Sri Lanka

Cinnamon, cloves and other spices are the island’s culinary gems

Sri Lanka, the fabled island of sapphires, rubies and other precious stones, is home to one of the least known Asian cuisines. Rarely found in restaurants outside the island itself, Sri Lankan fare is often mistaken for yet another Indian regional cuisine. To the culinary explorer, however, Sri Lankan food is as intriguing and unique as the many other customs of this island paradise.

Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon, is located off India’s southeast coast. The rugged terrain of the central highlands— characterised by high mountains and plateaus, steep river gorges and swathes of tea plantations—dominates much of the island. This falls away to sandy lowlands, rice paddies and long stretches of palm-fringed beaches.

The ancestors of today’s Sinhalese peoples arrived some 2,500 years ago from Northern India. They named themselves after a mythic ancestor who was born of a sinha (lion) and a princess. After conquering the local Yakshas, a succession of kingdoms—Sinhalese in the centre and south, and Tamil in the Jaffna Peninsula—rose and fell over the centuries. The first Portuguese ships chanced upon Sri Lanka in the early sixteenth century and set about trading in cinnamon and other spices. There followed four hundred years of Western presence in the form of Portuguese, Dutch and finally the British before Sri Lanka regained her independence in 1948.

Such diverse influences may be tasted in dishes of Arab biryani (yellow rice with meat and nuts), Malay nasi kuning (turmeric rice), Portuguese semolina love cakes, and Dutch breuders (dough cakes) and lampries (savoury rice and meat packets).

Sri Lankan cuisine, which is based upon rice with vegetable, fish or meat curries, and a variety of side dishes and condiments, reflects the geographical and ethnic differences of the land. Seafood dishes, such as Spicy Fish Stew (seer fish stew), Tamarind Claypot Fish (ambulthiyal), Coconut Curry Crabs and Rich Seafood Soup (Jaffna kool), are common to coastal and, increasingly, inland areas. The eating of large animals, such as cows and deer, is less popular due to the predominantly Buddhist and Hindu population; chicken and freshwater fish are usually preferred instead.

Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, coriander seeds, mace, pepper and cardamon pods.

Turmeric, fennel, fenugreek, cumin, mustard seeds and dried red chillies.

Sri Lanka is also blessed with an abundant harvest of fruits and vegetables. Jackfruit, breadfruit, okra, gourds, plantains and drumsticks are but some of the vegetables, tubers, and leaves that feature in one or other Sri Lankan dish.

It is a cuisine expressed in spices—cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, coriander, mace, pepper, cardamom, red chillies, mustard seeds, cumin, fenugreek and turmeric are all used to flavour curries, while some add flavour to desserts and cakes. The spices of Sri Lanka, which helped to shape the history of the island, are truly its culinary gems.

A Gustatory Paradise

Sri Lanka’s dry and wet seasons are reversed from one side of the island to the other by two monsoons. From May to August, the southwest monsoon, Yala, brings heavy rain to the southern, western and central highland regions, leaving the other side dry. From October to January, the gentler northeast monsoon, Maha, brings rain to the north of the island. The coastal regions are hot and humid year round, while the hill country feels like perpetual spring.

When Sri Lanka’s first settlers arrived from India in about 500 BC, the coastal lowlands they found were no paradise. Undaunted, they set to work making them one. They had brought with them the techniques of turning a stream into a small pond, and of digging sluices with gates to let water into small fields on demand. What happened over the next ten centuries is one of the greatest irrigation feats in world history: Sri Lanka’s system of reservoir “tanks” feeding a latticework of watercourses produced a rice surplus so large that it financed the island’s architectural and sculptural splendours.

The simple brown rice of those early times became the twenty-odd varieties grown today. The two monsoons translate to two harvests a year over much of the island. Low-country rice is mostly plain white rice that cooks easily and has no strong taste to distract from the curries. Somewhat upscale is a red rice that bursts as it cooks, yielding a fluffy white interior with reddish flecks on the surface—this is the festive suduru samba served when entertaining guests. The highest grade of rice is long-grained basmati, often used when aromatic dishes are desired. In between, many lesser varieties are grown, usually in small quantities for local use.

However, paddy agriculture is far from the only kind of farming. Slash-and-burn, or chena farming, is the bane of the back country, as it produces only two or three harvests of millet and root vegetables before depleting the soils and forcing the farmer to move on. But for many poor people, it is the only choice.

In a category all of its own is the island’s enormous production of tea. The nuances of Sri Lankan tea are as complex and sophisticated as the nuances of fine wine. Small family plantations can be found even a few kilometres inland from the coast, but the higher the plantation the better the tea. The premium Dambula and other highland teas grow on tidily pruned plantations that undulate over the landscape as gracefully as slow-flowing water. The teas are processed in multi-storey factories painted white or silver that stand out amid the landscape like ghosts on a green sea.

Wall painting at Sigiriya.

And of course one can’t overlook the island’s spice gardens. The gaily proclaimed ones along the highways to Kandy are for tourists. The serious spice plantations growing for export are found in moist valleys or hilly areas. Be they for tourist or export, the goods are the same: over here spindly, weedy bushes whose flower yields a darkish nubbin that dries into clove; over there bushy nutmeg trees with bright tan fruit.

The delicate seed pods of the cardamom grow symbiotically under clove plants. Gangly peppercorns cluster under the long leaves of their plant, looking rather like grape bunches that took their diet too seriously. Visitors to these professional spiceries are treated to a fabulous bouquet of odours as they learn all about how spices are grown and prepared for consumers the world over.

A final glance at the country’s agriculture focuses on the men who walk ropeways high in the sky doing the dangerous job of harvesting drippings from the flowers of the kitul palm. Treading gingerly along a single rope and guyline 15 metres (50 feet) or more above the ground, they tie shut the tips of the kitul ’s flowers with cord so they cannot open. The sap, which ordinarily would go into swelling the flower and then filling its fruit, instead oozes into clay pots tied to the flower’s stem. Every few days these are visited by the tappers, who empty the juice into a pot slung around their waists.

The resulting treacle has a unique flavour which matches superbly with Sri Lanka’s high-butterfat but bland curd or buffalo-milk yoghurt. When the treacle is hardened by boiling and then cooled, it becomes jaggery, the most popular sweetener on the island and an essential ingredient in most Sri Lankan desserts and sweetmeats.

A close cousin of this process does the same with coconut flowers. The frothy white sap ferments into toddy or ra, a foamy white alcohol that can be drunk as is or distilled into arrack. Ra is such a staple that it even lent its name to a town on the Colombo– Kandy railway line, Ragama—literally “Toddy Town.”

The sea’s bounty includes several kinds of tuna, plus grouper, whitefish, kingfish, barracuda, trevally, squid, octopus and a host of lesser species. One of the most popular fish in Sri Lanka is the seer or Spanish mackerel which is cooked in many styles.

Most fishing is done from old-fashioned oruwa dugout outrigger canoes lashed together with coconut-fibre twine. The old handmade katta maran (literally “big logs” and the origin of the word “catamaran”) dugouts come in various hues of salt-toughened wood. Their crews divide between “netters” and “chummers,” the latter a term for hook-and-line fishers that was borrowed from the British.

The fish left over after those for household use are sold to itinerant hawkers who have mounted wide wooden boxes on the back of bicycles. They wobble their way into the countryside, fish tails sticking out either side of the box, calling out “Lu! Lu!” (short for malu, the Sinhalese word for fish).

A drive along the coastal highway passes one ramshackle wooden roadside stall after the other with gorgeous rows of tuna lined up like cordwood. They also sell squid, seer, kingfish, slabs of shark big enough to cover a dinner plate, and tiny silver sprats that are dried and munched like popcorn.

Other stalls display freshly caught skipjacks drying in the sun. Although the chewy locally-dried tuna is often referred to as “Maldive fish,” the authentic Maldive fish used in restaurants is tougher than dried leather.

The most idiosyncratic of Sri Lanka’s fishermen are the island’s famous stilt fishers. These men wedge sturdy poles into rock crevices in the shallows, to which they attach a tiny sling-net that passes for a seat. While the catch is modest, some of the brilliantly coloured coral-dwellers they bring in, such as the striped mullet, are among the tastiest on the island.

Another fishing style is net casting. Fishermen patrol tidal pools and rocky ledges in the late after noon in search of the parrotfish or trevally hungry enough to let down its guard as night approaches. Netters have hurling styles so unique that locals can identify someone at a distance by the way he throws his net.

— Douglas Bullis

Fruit vendors pile their stalls high with whichever fruits are in season.

A Galle Market trader displays his kiri peni or curd and honey, a popular Sri Lankan snack. The “honey” that one sees in the roadside stalls and on restaurant menus is really treacle from the kitul palm. Curd is tradition ally made from buffalo milk.