Food and drink in Sri Lanka

Food in Sri Lanka is treated with very great respect, and it is thought of so highly that people offer it to their gods. A visitor to a Sri Lankan home, however humble the location and whatever caste or creed of your host, will be treated as an honoured guest and the quality and array of dishes offered for your enjoyment will invariably be the very best your host can afford. The best Sri Lankan food is to be had en famille, which is why eating in a restaurant can be disappointing as the only cuisine worthy of the name is prepared at home.

The most important meals of the day are breakfast and dinner. During the rest of the day people make do with a light meal or a savoury snack, commonly called "short eats". These snacks are usually eaten at a small restaurant or food stall and accompanied by tomato ketchup. Popular short eats include vade (similar to falafel), fish or vegetable rolls, and meat patties.

Flavours of the island
Breakfast - Sri Lankan style
Rice and curry
Chicken and mutton
Favourite fish
A vegetarian delight
Spices
Tropical fruits
A sweet tooth
Refreshments

A sweet tooth

Sri Lankans have a very sweet tooth and this is expressed in their love of all things made from sugar and syrup. The assorted rasakevillis (sweetmeats) are made with rice flour, coconut milk and sweetened with jaggery (unrefined brown sugar from palm sap). Another very popular sweet is thalaguli (sesame balls). Others to choose from include halapes (a mixture of coconut and jaggery), dodols and aluwas (fudge-like sweets), rasagullas (milk balls in sugar syrup), and bibikin (a traditional Sinhalese cake made from jaggery, coconut, cashews and dried fruit).

However, these sweet delicacies are rarely served as a dessert. Their elaborate preparation means that they are reserved for special occasions, but they can still be found in specialised shops throughout the year.

Pure ambrosia can be had in the form of curd and honey, buffalo curd served with thick, dark brown treacle made from the kitul palm. This will be offered as a "desert", a frequent mispronunciation of dessert, but it makes an ideal light breakfast or a quick roadside snack, and is a perfect foil to spicy food.

The Malay-inspired wattalapam, a rich coconut crème caramel with jaggery and cashew nuts, has practically turned itself into the national pudding.

A vegetarian delight

The vegetable stalls that line the roadside have a wonderful array of gourds, greens, garnishes and entirely unrecognisable vegetation, all an indication of how fertile and abundant the land can be in Sri Lanka.

The vegetables are always fresh and when cooked in traditional Sinhalese dishes are extremely appetising. Much of the Tamil food, like thosai, ulundu vade, marsala vade, and idlis (savoury cakes of dhal and rice flour), also has a vegetarian leaning. There will also always be something for the vegetarian palate in any Muslim restaurant. Godumba roti, a translucent envelope stuffed with mildly spiced vegetables, can quickly be turned into kotta roti, by ripping it to shreds and stir-frying it with practically any ingredient of your choice, or flipping it into an egg goddamba. Mallung is a healthy melange of shredded green vegetables with herbs, spices and grated coconut.

Breakfast - Sri Lankan style

As with all meals in Sri Lanka, breakfast is a feast of its own. Idiappa (string hoppers), egg hoppers, pittu, kiri bath, roti (stuffed bread) and the full accompaniments of creamy coconut sauces and sambols are just a few of the delicacies on offer at breakfast time. In many restaurants or hotels, as informal eateries are called in Sri Lanka, breakfast is served from 07.00 to 11.00, after which time a different menu will be available.

The hopper ("appa", in Sinhalese) has a delicate, puffy, crêpe-like texture combined with the taste of a crumpet, and moulded into a semi-spherical pancake. Made form batter containing coconut milk and palm toddy, it is left to sit for a whole night to give it time to ferment. The egg hopper has an egg broken into the centre, while a string hopper is like a nest of steamed rice vermicelli, used as an alternative to rice.

Pittu, a rice flour and shredded coconut mixture which is similar to a coarser type of cous-cous, is steamed inside a bamboo tube and eaten with hot sambol and a pinch of subtly spiced pol hoddi.

Kiri bath has a special place in Sri Lanka's panoply of culinary delights. A simple dish of thick rice pudding made with coconut milk and then cut into diamond shapes, it is central to festive offerings and celebrations. Kiri bath plays an important part in the New Year celebrations, and it is also included in a birthday or anniversary meal, during the wedding ceremony and afterwards at the banquet, and is used as a votive offering at temples and during festivals.

Chicken and mutton

Chicken and goat (mutton) are the most popular meats in Sri Lanka, since pork and beef are rare and banned from the cuisine of two of the island's religious communities - eating pork is prohibited in Islam and the cow is sacred to a Hindu. Sri Lankans are eating less and less meat, not for religious reasons but for hygiene, and the fact that the hot, humid climate is ill-suited to a diet containing a lot of meat.

Favourite fish

All fish and seafood is freshly caught and available in abundant variety. Crab is cooked in a dozen different ways, lobster is far tastier than its Mediterranean cousin, and seer, amberjack, skipjack, paraw, herring, pomfret, bonito, shark and mullet are regulars of the daily catch. Jambo (Jumbo) and Tiger prawns are massive, while the smaller shrimp and many other molluscs should not be discounted just because of their size, as their flavour is always excellent.

Drying fish in the sun began as a method of preservation, but the intense flavours produced soon inspired Sri Lankan cooks to use it in unexpected ways. A teaspoon or more of tiny dried shrimps or Maldive Fish is used in all sorts of dishes.

Apart from the coastal resorts and tourist spots, Sri Lankans eat very little fish, since it is very expensive and does not travel well.

Refreshments

With their meals, Sri Lankans generally drink water, or sometimes soft drinks or beer (except on Poya [Full Moon] or religious days, when alcohol is not served) but, at any time of the day, King Coconut water makes a deliciously refreshing drink.

The King Coconut or thambili can be seen hanging in golden bunches by the roadside with a man armed with a machete close by. Its juice is a safe and very refreshing way of slaking a thirst, once the coconut seller has expertly sliced open the top with a deft twist of his weapon. It can also be an effective pick-me-up for a hangover. The balance of glucose and potassium makes it a delicious health drink for convalescents and is regularly prescribed by Ayurvedic doctors. In a medical emergency it can even be used as an intravenous drip.

Another local beverage made from the coconut palm is toddy. This is tapped from the flower of the coconut and left to ferment. New toddy is light and refreshing, but when fermented it can become as alcoholic as cider.

A distilled spirit made from toddy becomes arrack, the nation's favourite tipple that is widely used in punches and cocktails but also drunk neat or with a mixer (coke, tonic and ginger beer are the favourites). The local arrack can be very potent, whereas the matured VSOA and Old Reserve are smoother.

Local breweries produce very palatable beers (Lion, Carlsberg and Three Coins Pilsner) using imported hops and water brought from the highlands of Nuwara Eliya in the Hill Country.

The tea break is a tradition in its own right and is universally popular, a moment to savour every day in every conceivable environment. Fruit juices and local brands of soft drinks are inexpensive and are very good alternatives to the many imported products readily available, which can carry an extortionate 100% tax.

Rice and curry

The national meal in not referred to as "curry and rice" but "rice and curry", for a Sri Lankan will sit down to eat in front of a mountainous plate of rice to which is added small spoonfuls of curries, meat or vegetable (often with added coconut milk and lentils), along with spoonfuls of various spicy pickles, sweet and sour chutneys, and fiery hot sambols (ground coconut or onion mixed with red chillies and lime).

The term "curry" can be as confusing as the various aromas wafting up from a spice vendor's stall. Curry is not the product of one plant but a mixture of spices that can change depending on individual taste. Coriander, chillies, mustard, cumin, pepper, cinnamon and garlic are just some of the common ingredients which add flavour to both seafood and meat curries. It is this mixture of spices that is an integral component of the dishes known as "curries", generally presented as side dishes arranged around a large bowl of rice, the centrepiece of any dinner in Sri Lanka.

More than 15 varieties of rice are grown on the island, from the tiny white, translucent pearl shapes to long-grained basmati and the red kakuluhaal, a nutty, very flavoursome strain. The fully cooked (not al dente) rice has the highly spiced accompaniments kneaded into it using the right hand only so that each mouthful has a mixture of flavours. However, when massaging the rice and curries together, food should not pass the first knuckle of the fingers in order to observe the correct etiquette.

Spices

Spices are unavoidable in Sri Lanka, and make very good souvenirs to take home.

Flavours of the Island

Sri Lankan cuisine echoes its history. Situated on the maritime trading routes of the Indian Ocean, it has borrowed all sorts of recipes, from aluwa, sugared semolina from the Arab world, to dodol (coconut milk caramel with palm syrup), sathe (thin strips of meat on skewers) and sambol from Malaysia.

It has also incorporated the culinary traditions of the various peoples who have settled on the island over the centuries. Muslims sometimes prefer biryani, rice sautéed with spices, to local rice and curry. The Portuguese handed down new combinations of sugar and spices, such as the bolo de amor, a semolina cake with cashew nuts flavoured with cinnamon. Lamprais was inherited from the lomprijst of the Dutch. As for the British, they left the island a flavour to which it will always be devoted - tea. Together with the countless variations of rice and curry, all this exotic fare blends into a unique and very rich cuisine.

Tropical Fruits

There is a cornucopia of pineapple, passion fruit, pomegranate, papaya, avocado and mango waiting to be eaten in Sri Lanka. Bananas come in various colours (red, green and yellow) and sizes, from the finger-thick monkey banana to the colossal plantain, and some varieties are included in Ayurvedic treatments.

Quite apart from these tropical fruits available at home, there are red, cherry-like lovi-lovi fruit, mangosteens with flesh that tastes like lychee, and wood apple - good as a rich truffle pudding or a refreshing drink. Also try the sweet-tasting star apples and rambutan - red and hairy on the outside but similar to lychee on the inside. Go for custard apples, cherimoya or bullock's heart, which are a happy trio of relatives packed with white pulp and black seeds.

Then there is the honey-sweet ripe jakfruit, several kinds of guava that make fine jelly, and that maverick monster, the durian, whose reputation and smell usually precedes it. The durian, to some tasting of nougat while others a cross between jakfruit and fried onions, is a pineapple-sized fruit with a hard, spiky exterior, and strongly but improbably rumoured to be an aphrodisiac.