Exploring the unique flavours of Sri Lankan cuisine beyond Indian influence
Sri Lankan cuisine, often overshadowed by Indian food, offers a rich blend of flavours, making it a distinct and diverse culinary tradition of its own.
One reason why so many people in neighbouring countries may be ambivalent about Indians is because of our belief that everything in South Asia is either derived from India or is actually Indian. So, Indians will refuse to take Pakistani food seriously: “Just Punjabi food made by Punjabis who mistakenly imagine that they are the heirs to some Awadhi tradition”. We regard Bangladeshi food as being a mere sub-branch of mainstream Bengali cuisine. Nepali food is dismissed as just another Indian regional cuisine. We deny that either Bhutan or the Maldives can boast of a proper, full-fledged cuisine. And so on.
All of these dismissive generalisations are arrogant, unkind and unfair. Regrettably, they are also not necessarily entirely inaccurate. Otherwise, why are there so few Pakistani restaurants around the world? When Pakistanis do open restaurants in America or the United Kingdom (UK), they call them Indian restaurants. As for the Bangladeshis, they don’t even have the nerve to serve their own food, delicious though it may be. Instead, in places like the UK, they serve a made up curry-house cuisine which is native to no part of the world, let alone South Asia.
The one country where Indian culinary arrogance collapses, however, is Sri Lanka. Indians can’t figure out why it has such a great gastronomic tradition. After all, it is a relatively small island. It is half the size of Tamil Nadu and its population is one third the size of Tamil Nadu’s. But as much we would like to dismiss Lankan cuisine as being a branch of Indian food, it is, in reality, a complex and nuanced cuisine with only a few nods to Indian traditions.
After many visits to Sri Lanka (the latest of which was last week), I have come to the conclusion that there may be two major reasons for the divergence between Indian and Sri Lankan cuisines. The first is that Lanka has been influenced by many different culinary traditions: Dutch, Malay, Indonesian and Arab, to name a few. The second is that, despite is relatively small size, Sri Lanka is an incredibly diverse country, divided not just into Buddhist Sinhalas and Hindu Tamils as we often like to think.
Even Sri Lanka’s Tamils are not a monolithic community. There are Ceylon Tamils who have been there for centuries (and they include a significant Christian minority) and Indian Tamils, who came much later mainly to work on the tea and rubber plantations.
Then there are the curiously named Ceylon Moors, Muslims with origins in India or the Middle East. A small but influential minority consists of the Burghers (a little like our Anglo Indians) thought of as being of Dutch origin, but actually from many different European countries. As influential (in cuisine terms) are the so-called Malays, who have been in Lanka for centuries.
Last week, in Colombo I spoke to Tasha Marikkar, a food writer whose family history merges many of Sri Lanka ethnic groups and whose excellent book Jaya Flava, I would recommend to anyone who is interested in Sri Lankan food. Marikkar pointed out to me that most of the distinctive features of Lankan food emerged out of the marriage of cultures. For instance, Indians are always surprised to discover that Lankans eat a lot of sambols, which are clearly derived from the sambals of Indonesia and Malaysia. They either came with the Malays or with the Dutch, who also ruled Indonesia.
Lamprais, one of the signature dishes of Sri Lankan cuisine, comes from the Burgher community and one theory is it may have emerged out of the Indonesian influences that the Dutch brought to Sri Lanka.
The classic Sri Lankan crab curry was created by the Ceylon Tamils. Kottu, the top Sri Lankan street food, was invented by Muslims in the north to make use of leftovers. Saruwath, a sweet drink you find at street stalls, is a descendant of the Arab sharbat. Sri Lanka’s buriani is clearly inspired by our biryani but it is quite different and may taste to the Indian palate like a pulao rather than a biryani.
Even the dishes that we think we know from our own cuisine are very different in Sri Lanka. For instance, they call their dal, “dal curry” and put coconut milk in it. At the Palmyrah restaurant in Colombo, known for its Tamil dishes, the dosa was like a spongy pancake and seemed to have been made without any dal being added to the batter.
Nothing epitomises Sri Lankan cuisine as well as the hopper, now the most famous Sri Lankan dish in the UK thanks to the success of the Hoppers mini chain, owned by the wildly successful JKS group, and run by Karan Gokani. Everyone is agreed that the hopper is descended from the appam or appa of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. But how did the name hopper come to be attached to it? One theory is that Brits could not pronounce appa so they called it a hopper which seems so far-fetched that it may be true.
Gokani, who has done so much to popularise the hopper in the West says that the Sri Lankan hopper differs from the Indian appam because it is cooked in a lighter aluminium pan “yielding a lacy edge and a signature bowl shape”.
Hoppers can be much larger than the Kerala appam. The great Lankan chef, Dharshan Munidasa, says that, years ago, he designed the large hopper pan that has now become a standard at many restaurants only to discover that the ladle with which the batter was poured into the pan was so small that it was impossible to do it in one smooth motion. So Munidasa invented a larger ladle too.
There are many versions of the hopper, but my favourite is the egg hopper which you don’t find in Kerala or Tamil Nadu (unless they’re copying the Sri Lankan version). Last week in Colombo, I ate egg hoppers every day, sometimes with the caramelised onion sambol which they call sini sambol. And sometimes with a variety of upmarket toppings that the chefs at ITC Ratnadipa, my hotel, had dreamt up.
Unfortunately, we don’t get much Sri Lankan food in India at least partly because of that characteristic arrogance which leads us to pretend that it is not a distinctive cuisine. That is a real shame. Karan Gokani, a Gujarati from Mumbai, discovered Sri Lankan food and fell in love with it to the extent that he is now one of the cuisine’s greatest advocates.
Speaking as another Gujarati from Mumbai, I can see why he became so infatuated with Lankan food. I just wish that more of us were open-minded enough to try this great cuisine that waits, mostly unnoticed, on our doorstep.
Source: Vir Sanghvi / Hindustan Times
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