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—characterized 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 center 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 love cakes, and Dutch breuders (dough cakes) and lampries (savory 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 seer fish stew, ambulthiyal (sour claypot fish), crab curry, and Jaffna kool (Tamil seafood soup), 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.
Sri Lanka is also blessed with an abundant harvest of fruits and vegetables. Jackffuit, 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 chiles, mustard seeds, cumin, fenugreek, and turmeric are all used to flavor curries, while some add flavor to desserts and cakes. The spices of Sri Lanka, which helped to shape the history of the island, are truly its culinary gemstones.
Up to fifty fishers start at dawn and take four to six hours to bring in a purse net with its rich harvest of reef fish.
Gustatory Geography
The fruits of land and sea are in equal abundance on this paradise isle
Douglas Bullis
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 splendors.
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 miles 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-story factories painted white or silver that stand out amid the landscape like ghosts on a green sea.
A tapper collects sap from a kitul palm tree to he made into jaggery, the kitul palm sugar that sweetens so many Sri Lankan dishes.
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 odors 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 fifty 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 flavor 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-fiber twine. The old handmade katta maran
