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).
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.
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 ofVictoria 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 Cookeryinstructs, "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.
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