- Vegetable with coconut,pineapple curry, prawn curry and rice.
- Egg hopper with sambol.
- kiri bath
A delicately seasoned dish suddenly turns savoury and a totally spiceless one becomes a festive essential in Sri Lankan cuisine.
I’d heard that Sri Lankan food was a cross between that of our South,
and of South East Asia; that ingredients, processes and spices (pepper,
cinnamon, cloves, turmeric) were like ours. But that a twist of
freshness came from a slightly different store of aromatics like lemon
grass and pandanus. So choosing it as a holiday destination was easy,
especially given the grey grimness that is Delhi in January.
It’s unfair on a cuisine to have to confine comment to 900 words, so for
now I’ll focus on highlights of meals — curries, vegetables, rice and
hoppers. I ate in Colombo, Bentota and Galle, with a few pit stops, but
still just the southwest coast. I’m told that the north has a slightly
different cooking style, as does Kandy in the centre. Where we went,
though, the cuisine was a celebration of rice, seafood, coconuts and
other fruit.
The first sign that the food was going to be a delight was at the Galle
Face hotel in Colombo. Its beautiful location apart, the breakfast
buffet was worth the stay. There were the expected — Continental and
English breakfasts — but there were the local: hoppers (from appam… appa), string hoppers; and puttu (or pittu), the steamed cylinder of ground rice and coconut eaten with curries or palm sugar and sambol,
a chutney-like accompaniment. Appams in India are round pancakes, thick
and spongy in the centre and delicately lacy at the edges, with a
golden rice-white inner side and a golden-edging-on-brown underside. In
Sri Lanka they were less aerated, so less porous, and crisper and
thinner. The hopper cook at the Club Bentota said that, unlike in
Kerala, they didn’t use toddy or yeast to leaven the batter; it was
rice, coconut water, coconut cream and what she called “hopper soda”. So
that first breakfast at the Galle Face I had first some of a plain
hopper, then some with prawn curry and finally an egg hopper. The egg
yolk was orange, nestling prettily in the base of the hopper, and after a
couple of mouthfuls I ladled some prawn curry on to the smashed yolk
and that was paradise. The prawn curry was a pale golden orange, with
flecks of red chilli and sweet with coconut milk, fresh pink succulent
prawns and some green stuff. The spices were delicate and not totally
familiar: pandan leaves, what in Sri Lanka they call rampe (it amazes me that the flower of pandanus, screwpine, gives us the completely different smelling kewra).
The next good meal was at the universally recommended Raja Bhojun, an
all-you-can-eat restaurant nearby. Most memorable was the crab, in a
hot, generously peppered curry flavoured with curry leaves. There were
about 20 other dishes, thick dal, vegetables and “devilled
chicken”, which we then went on to eat again at Bentota. Pork, beef,
chicken are all “devilled” and very popular. To me they were like a
cheap Chinese “chilli chicken sweet-and-sour”, fried bites of meat with
crunchy onions, tomatoes and capsicum, coated with tomato ketchup.
Forgettable. The interesting dishes, which Chef Priyal cooked, were
mallum, a sautéed mix of finely chopped vegetables cooked with grated
coconut; curries of prawn and pineapple. There are broadly two spice
powders which are made — or bought — and stored: one for vegetarian, and
the other for meat dishes.
One completely spiceless dish I loved was a festive essential, kiri
bath, milk rice. The milk isn’t dairy, it’s coconut. Soft, almost mashed
white rice, barely salted, is cooked with coconut milk and set into
soft squares. Chef Priyal suggested I eat it with lunu miris, a spicy sambol,
which I did, but in the end I ate it with marmalade. It’s so delicately
seasoned that you can barely tell it’s savoury, but with honey or
marmalade, the salt and sugar sharpen and define each other.
On our last evening in Sri Lanka we made a discovery, inadvertently, of
something we were not in quest of, good Sri Lankan curry. I’ve been
trying my best to avoid cliché and not use the word s*r*nd*p*ty. So,
although we all know of the three princes of S*r*nd*p, the old name for
Sri Lanka, I won’t. By then we were done with curries, but since we were
leaving the next day….
In the charming little township that is Fort Galle, there are several
cafés and bistros serving Western food. And several who make Sinhalese
curries and “Indian buriyani”. This one, Fort Dew, faced the
ramparts of the fort, and had a fresh breeze coming in from the water
beyond. We ordered two dishes: rice and curry and chicken and rice and
curry and prawns. Curry meant many, many vegetable add-ons, so rice,
chicken (or prawn) curry, dal, four veggies, papad. The chicken curry was fragrant with garam masala,
in shiny orange gravy. Tender green beans were cut long, about two
inches, in a mild pale creamy sauce. Carrots, cut into small diamonds,
were yellow and coconutty. Potatoes in white gravy which smelt of
fenugreek seeds, dry potatoes with browned caramelised onions and curry
leaf. Prawns in spicy reddish chopped onion gravy. Chana dal
fragrant with cinnamon, garlic and ginger, tempered with dry red
chillies. Crisp brown papads. Freshly cut green lime and long green
chillies on the side. Each thing we ate tasted different from the other
and was Best in Class. When we’d placed our order, we were told that it
would take 40 minutes. Obviously everything was cooked fresh. We left
wishing we had happened on this place sooner.
http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/scurrying-for-curry/article4347952.ece
