"Is it like Indian food?" That's the first question most people ask about Sri Lankan cuisine—if they know where the tiny island nation is, which is rare. (It's just southeast of the southern tip of India).
My stock answer? "Sort of."
There are some common elements, to be sure. But the "rice and curry" spreads that make up most Sri Lankan meals are pretty different from the northern saag paneer or Goan vindaloo at your local lunch buffet. Sri Lankan food offers a vivid array of flavor combinations: sweet caramelized onion relishes, bitter melon, spicy scraped coconut, and the burn of curry tamed by mild rice, and palm sugar sweetened desserts. Samosas and dhal (lentil curry) look familiar, but upon closer inspection, these, too, have a definitively Sri Lankan spin: these thinner curries tend to be more heavily spiced than many Indian versions, and the cuisine is more inclusive of non-native ingredients, brought by international trade moving through the island. Foods that seemed to be known territory find exciting new applications in Sri Lanka, where noodles come in pancake form and pancakes serve as both bowl and base of the feast.
The Basics
Sri Lankan food is not for the timid eater: the fiery curries, sweet caramelized onion in seeni sambal (onion relish), and sour lime pickle are all dominant, powerful flavors that startle awake senses dulled by the thick, hot island air. While visitors to the island—or those eating in Sri Lankan restaurants outside the country—may find watered down versions, most Sri Lankan cooking is unapologetically, punch-you-in-the-face, get-the-adrenaline-pumping flavored.
Crab curry with rice, mallum, and side dishes.
Rice is an ever-present antidote to these big flavors. A meal in Sri Lanka is called "rice and curry"—a term that's almost synonymous with food in general. There's rice, of course, and usually a curry with a thin broth and large chunks of the featured protein (beef, pork, fish, goat, and on from there), plus an assortment of side dishes—anywhere from four to nine or ten, depending on the time and place. For a quicker bite, there are "short eats," a Sri Lankan term essentially denoting snacks—often a coconut roti with hot sauce, a newspaper cone of fried spiced chickpeas, or maybe a samosa.
All the food, whether coconut sambal made from coconut plucked from a nearby tree and served as part of a rice and curry, or a shrimp vadai (fritter) purchased from a vendor through a train window and wrapped in his children's old schoolwork, bears marks of Sri Lanka's geography and culture. As with many island nations, traders rampaged across the island, bringing spices (the now ubiquitous red pepper), dishes (a "Chinese roll" looks suspiciously like what we'd call an egg roll in the States), and whole categories of food (such as Dutch sweets).
Shrimp fritters on the train.
75% of Sri Lankans are Sinhalese (mostly Buddhist), and the food generally described as Sri Lankan is their food. Tamils (mostly Hindus), especially those in the north, use slightly different spices and other ingredients in their curries, but the format of the dishes is similar to food found on the rest of the island. Many Westerners' only reference to Tamil culture is the Tamil Tigers, a group of militant separatists from the north. Since the government's defeat of the group in 2009, the island is quite safe for tourists, though the new reputation has not fully spread—so this exciting, delicious destination remains affordable to visit. (If this article makes your mouth water, go now!)
Muslims, mostly on the east coast of the island, have popularized dishes familiar from other parts of the world, such as biryani, and the Burghers (descendants of colonial Europeans) introduced Dutch and Portuguese candies and desserts.
Essential Ingredients in Sri Lankan Cuisine
The building blocks of Sri Lankan cuisine are rice, coconut, and native tropical fruits and vegetables. Every Sri Lankan cookbook I've found has multiple pages on the preparation of rice, with one, Ceylon Cookery, devoting five full pages to the topic. The island grows some 15 varieties of rice (down from 280 just 50 years ago, and 400 in times before that), some of which are used for various types of rice flour pancakes (called hoppers) and rice noodles (called string hoppers).
Greens vendors at Batticaloa market on Sri Lanka's eastern coast.
When asked if I recommend Sri Lanka as a vacation destination, I'd say yes to everyone—unless they're allergic to coconut. Stacks of yellow king coconut are fixtures on the side of the road, ready to be hacked open by a young man or little old lady wielding a machete. The liquid inside puts commercial coconut water to shame; the real stuff has a perfectly clean, sweet-without-the-sticky taste. (Pro tip: after you finish your king coconut, hand it back to the vendor, who will crack it open and craft a spoon from the side, so you can scrape out the coconut meat within.)
But coconut's not just for drinking: every rice and curry is served with pol sambal, a scraped coconut condiment that varies in spiciness from table to table. Coconut is a major ingredient in the greens dish mallum, and, of course, it's a big player in the island's sweets. When I started testing Sri Lankan recipes, the first thing I did was buy a giant bag of desiccated coconut.
Coconut sambal.
Stroll through the countryside and the fragrant smell of cardamom and curry leaves will inevitably grab you. In the city, piles of turmeric and fennel seed sit in ceramic pots at the market, waiting patiently for their turn in a curry. These spices are fundamental to the cuisine, serving as the base for the many curries, sambals (relishes), sundals (salads), and mallums (greens dishes) served with most meals. Black pepper is native to the island and was the most powerful spice in Sri Lankan cooking before spicy peppers arrived on colonial era trading ships. Black pepper curries still pop up on menus, and are worth seeking out for the original flavors of the island—and because they offer an entirely different type of heat.
Once chili peppers arrived, they took off: over 60 types grow on the island, and you can judge the spiciness of most dishes by how much of the blush of red pepper, used fresh or dried, it has taken on. To continue making a curry, you'll likely need fenugreek, cardamom, cumin, fennel seed, cloves, and coriander, all used whole or ground. From underground, garlic, ginger, and turmeric are often added in chunks, while curry leaves and pandan leaves are used fresh. Finally, a list of Sri Lankan curry ingredients would be incomplete without the local cinnamon, often called Ceylon cinnamon, after the island's former name. (What we usually call cinnamon in the US is actually the less subtle and balanced cassia, rather than the warm, gently spicy and floral-scented Ceylon cinnamon).
The real distinction of Sri Lankan cuisine is not the individual spices used, but the prominence with which they're featured. Mercy John, the Tamil proprietress of Victoria Guest House on the east coast of Sri Lanka and a masterful cook, says that all spices should be fried in mustard oil before they are used in a curry. Ceylon Cookery, an instruction manual geared toward Sri Lankan young people just starting their own households, offers instructions on unroasted, roasted, and fried spice curries. Whatever the starting base of the curry, it is often topped in the end with a smattering of fried spices (the process of frying them and adding at the end is called tempering), so that vivid flavor is never missing.
There's one more key component to many dishes: Maldive fish. It's bonito tuna that's boiled, dried in intense sun until rock-hard, and shredded. While it's used to add savoriness, it is not as pungent as the fish sauce or dried or fermented fish or shrimp of Asian cuisines further East. "Care should be taken," Ceylon Cookery instructs, "not to allow the Maldive fish flavour to predominate over other flavours." Meat and fish curries are generally left to develop their own strong flavors, but nearly every vegetable dish gets the fish's umami injection. It is nearly imperceptible, other than an underlying boost to the flavor, much like that of MSG—you'll hardly notice a "fishy" flavor.
Sri Lankan Curries
Sri Lankan curries feature sizable chunks of fresh protein swimming in bright, fragrantly-spiced broths. Along the coasts, you'll often see fish, shrimp, or crab. In the high hills of central Sri Lanka, pork is used; chicken, beef, goat, and lamb are found island-wide. Crab curry is the stunner, and rightly famous, with the delicate local crab meat absorbing brilliant Sri Lankan spices.
The enormous, incredible, and incredibly spicy crab from the Ministry of Crab in Colombo.
A curry's color is determined by how various spices are initially used and treated. Pork curry, which you'll see in every color from light yellow to a nearly black shade, is often made with golaka, a dried fruit somewhat like tamarind, which gives sticky, sour notes to balance the otherwise rich broth (the pork is always cooked with all the fat left on). Deep red "Jaffna curry," usually Tamil-style versions from the northern part of the island, is most often made with goat and with seafood. The goat version tends to be the hotter, with even more peppers than you'll find elsewhere, standing up to the strong flavor of the meat. Seafood curries, meanwhile, often have an additional secret ingredient: the ground, dried stalk of the palm fruit. Used as a thickener and for its nutty flavor, it's not an easy ingredient to find outside Sri Lanka.
...[ Continue to next page ]
Comments