want to know abt srilankan dishes

Hi Uma!

I have a few cookbooks which include Sri Lankan recipes, but I am not sure if they are available for purchase in India (they were published for distribution in North America). If you are interested, I can post their titles, though - you can certainly have books shipped from anywhere to everywhere nowadays.

In the meanwhile, I have an article for you. It was from the New York Times. Normally, I would not post an entire article, as it could be construed as copyright infringement or something akin to that, but the article is old enough that you'd have to pay to get it from their archives. I also have some recipes I can post for you.

I will start with the article, which is wonderful - just don't tell anyone I posted it here, hahaha!

Just Off India, Kissed by Europe

October 13, 2004
By AMANDA HESSER

GALLE, Sri Lanka

THE owner of a cinnamon plantation near here, R. K.
Ariyasena, greeted me with a wide smile and a handshake
that felt like gravel. A farmer's handshake. It was very
hot, and he was wearing the standard summer attire of Sri
Lankans: not much.

While my husband, Tad, and I stood in the dirt courtyard
between Mr. Ariyasena's home and his cinnamon peeling
workshop, he and a worker braided a coconut-husk rope into
a loop. The worker put his feet inside the loop and used it
for leverage as he shinnied up a coconut tree like a
squirrel. Soon golden-orange King coconuts were dropping
from above. Mr. Ariyasena caught one and chopped the husk
until he broke through, then, using the point of his
machete, he poked a delicate hole in the top and inserted a
straw. He handed it to me.

King coconut juice has a slightly sweet, slightly acidic
tenor that never weighs on your tongue long enough for you
to decide whether it's a fruit or vegetable. When the
coconut was drained, Mr. Ariyasena cracked it in half and
cut off a wedge of the yellow husk for scooping out the
sweet, custardlike flesh. Aperitif and amuse-bouche in one.


We'd come to see cinnamon, but it's easy to get distracted
by the unexpected here. An island suspended between the 5th
and 10th parallels, Sri Lanka is shaped like a fat tear
rolling off the chin of India. The country is largely a
dense and steamy jungle, and it takes forever to drive even
a few miles. But it is hard not to be won over by a land
where more than 30 varieties of banana grow, where
jackfruit weighing 40 pounds dangle impossibly from the
trunks of trees, where pepper vines crawl, mangoes hang in
abundance, where trucks tilt and sway under the weight of
pumpkins and bitter gourds as they scream down narrow roads
- where everywhere you look is something strange and
edible.

The reason Western chefs haven't discovered Sri Lankan food
is that, until recently, the island has been roiled by
violence between the Tamils in the north of the island and
Sri Lanka's Sinhalese-run government. When we were there,
the threat of suicide bombings by the Tamil separatists was
not sufficiently worrisome to keep the checkpoint guards
from napping behind barriers covered with brightly colored
advertisements for products like Singer sewing machines.

Sri Lanka, which means "resplendent land" has never had
much patience for peace. The first outsiders to land there
were from India; they were followed by Arab traders.
Michael Ondaatje, in his memoir "Running in the Family,"
writes: "The island seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese.
The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as
its shape - Serendip, Ranapida ("island of gems"),
Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon -
the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped
ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword
or bible or language."

Along the roadside people sell boiled corn, brought by the
Portuguese and chickpea fritters spiced with chilies,
called vadai, from India. Every village has a bakery that
offers white sandwich bread, brought by the Portuguese, and
tea, a vestige of the British, the last colonists to leave.


Odd English names persist. The bowl-shaped coconut crepes
known as "appa" in India are usually called "hoppers" here.
A betting chain is named Sporting Times Turf Accountants,
and many villages have small restaurants called "bakery
hotels."

But the cuisine is the very opposite of bangers and mash.
Nor is it exactly Indian. Sri Lankan cooks use coconut milk
where most Indians use yogurt, coconut oil rather than
ghee, and they cook with more fish and more chilies. The
cuisine is closest in spirit to that of Kerala, the
southwestern sliver of India. Both cuisines are largely
dependent on fish, fruit, coconut and herbs like curry leaf
rather than the dried spices so familiar in northern Indian
cooking. Sri Lankan cooking is less polished, more wild and
rustic: a profusion of densely perfumed curries, shredded
salads, herbal broths and countless configurations of rice.


Curries here are textured with large shards of cinnamon,
coarsely cut slices of onion and whole chilies, as if it
were too hot to cut anything more finely. The dal is looser
than it is in India, the salads drier and spicier. Cooks
rely heavily on aromatics like fresh curry leaves and rampe
(or pandan leaf), a long bladelike leaf from the screwpine
tree that smells like fresh corn and onion. Tamarind and
its frequent substitute, goraka, add tang to curries, and
Maldives fish, a smoked and sun-dried skipjack tuna that is
shaved, is used for salt and depth in condiments and
broths.

Most curries divide into three types: black, red and white.
Black curries are made with a base of roasted spices like
coriander, cumin and fennel. Red curries have fewer spices
but lots of chilies. White curries, made with coconut milk,
tend to have more liquid and are mild.

An important distinction exists between "first coconut
milk" and "second coconut milk." Coconut milk is made by
swishing freshly grated coconut with hot water (a half-cup
coconut to one cup water) and straining out the rich, thick
milk - the first coconut milk. The same coconut is blended
with a second batch of water, to make a thinner second
coconut milk. For simmered dishes, the second coconut milk
is used as the cooking liquid, and the first coconut milk
is stirred in at the end as a finishing touch. More than
one cook made a point to tell me that lesser cooks use
canned coconut milk and coconut milk powder, the Sri Lankan
equivalent of Betty Crocker Potato Buds.

Some cooks may now use safflower oil rather than coconut
oil and aluminum pots instead of clay, but very little else
about the cooking - or the culture for that matter - feels
modernized. It is still common to see women carrying jugs
of water from community wells and Tamil children whose
parents have painted their foreheads with a round black
"pottu," made of charcoal, to deflect the evil eye.

Agriculture is a source of great pride in Sri Lanka. In the
Sinhalese caste system, which is fading, farmers
traditionally rank highly, as do fishermen. (Laundry
workers, by contrast, are in a low caste.) The colonists
developed Sri Lanka's main agricultural exports (coconut,
tea and rubber), but there is a tremendous internal trade
in food.

Nearly seven million pounds of produce is traded every day
at the open-air market known, rather officiously, as the
Dambulla Dedicated Economic Center. Dambulla is near the
island's geographic center, and the market, which opened in
1999, attracts farmers from all over to stock and man its
144 stalls. They arrive early in the evening on trucks
weighed down with snake gourds; manioc leaves; bitter
gourd; fat carrots; leeks; curry bananas; gotu kola (a
salad leaf); ginger; tiny, bitter eggplants and cucumbers
the color of mangoes.

Hundreds of traders and farmers in sarongs and flip-flops
tote vegetables in gunny sacks flung over their shoulders.
A bearded old man walks through pushing a bicycle with a
box on the back and bag of ice cream cones, tooting a
silver horn. At a stall near the entrance, a young boy
fries vadai next to a woman selling betel leaves, areca
nuts, tobacco and lime: the components of the unmistakable
red chew that stains the mouths of so many Sri Lankans.
(It's bitter and mouth-numbing though Sri Lankans insist it
cleans your teeth.)

Shalitha Presad Warnasuriya, the market's manager, said his
staff had been trying to get farmers to use plastic crates
instead of gunny sacks to cut down on waste. In India, he
said, 4.5 rupees, or about 4 cents, are spent to produce
two pounds of onions. Here it is closer to 16 rupees, or 15
cents, because so much produce rots on the way to the
market. The concept of refrigerating produce to increase
its shelf life is still an alien notion. "People won't buy
vegetables that were stored in the fridge," he said.

One happy result of old fashioned distribution methods is
that you know the food hasn't traveled far. Simple,
traditional Sri Lankan cooking can be had at most roadside
"hotels" or "bath kaddes" (rice boutiques). On the drive
from Kandy to Jaffna, we stopped at Matara Anuradisi Hotel
& Bakery, an open-air general store selling Munchee
Biscuits and Bingo Cream Wafers as well as nail polish and
soap. We took a table in back and ordered the one thing on
the menu: "lunch." Our waiter scuffed back to the cement
kitchen and returned with four plates and a bowl of hot
water. He poured the hot water on the top plate, then
poured it onto the plate beneath, and so on. Our dishes
were now "sterilized."

He then opened the wire mesh doors on a wood cabinet and
dished out our food, which had been sitting in the
90-degree heat for hours. Rather than think about it, we
tucked into the fiery fish curry, yellow dal made with
coconut milk and flecked with onions, cucumber curry and a
fragrant local salad called gova mallung, which is made
with finely shredded cabbage, onion, turmeric and freshly
grated coconut. A mound of rice was placed on the table
along with a few scraps of newspaper that were to serve as
napkins. Lunch for four cost 75 cents.

SRI LANKANS eat both samba rice, a fat round grain that is
cooked soft, and red rice. Sometimes they eat curry on a
large slab of white sandwich loaf. But it is unclear why
these haven't been put out of business by the hopper, a
sublime crepe made with rice flour and coconut milk, and
fermented with toddy, a milk-white spirit made from kithul
palm sap. The ubiquitous hopper shops are identified by
glass cases out front for hopper pans, which resemble
miniature woks.

Around 5 p.m. the hopper makers gear up for the evening. A
ladleful of batter is poured into the pans, swirled around
the edges and cooked until crisp and dimpled on the
surface.

Savory hoppers are eaten with curries and, as with all
curries, they are served with sambols, a class of uncooked
condiments whose chili levels range from excruciatingly hot
to inferno. Katta sambol is made by grinding onions (which
look more like American shallots) with chilies and Maldives
fish. (I used dried shrimp as a substitute in the recipes.)
Pol sambol is the easiest to like: a mound of shredded
coconut that mildly tempers a blend of chili, onion,
Maldives fish and lime juice.

For breakfast Sri Lankans make string hoppers, a steamed
nest of vermicellilike rice noodles, and soak them with
kiri hodi, a coconut broth infused with cinnamon stick,
curry leaves, rampe, fenugreek, turmeric, onion and green
chili: all the essential flavors of Sri Lankan cooking.
Breakfast here puts you in the mood for a good long nap.

Some Sri Lankans also eat savory herbal broths called kola
kanda with a nugget of jaggery for breakfast. Charmaine
Solomon, the author of "The Complete Asian Cookbook"
(Tuttle, 2002), who grew up in a Dutch burgher family in
Sri Lanka, said she had a Sinhalese friend whose family ate
herbal broths in the morning. Her family, she said, "had
hoppers and string hoppers, and we had bacon and eggs on
Sundays."

On our last day in Sri Lanka, luck was on our side. Manuja
Illangasariya, our young driver (having a local driver is a
necessity on Sri Lanka's demolition-derby-style roadways;
write your will before you go), invited us to his parents'
home for pittu, the Sri Lankan equivalent of couscous - a
steamed roll made with rice flour and freshly grated
coconut - and curry.

Mr. Illangasariya's parents live in Panadura, an
upper-middle-class suburb of Colombo, the capital. We were
welcomed into a new two-story home with white tile floors.
In the kitchen was a single countertop holding two portable
gas burners. There was a sink in the corner and a small
refrigerator, but no shelves or drawers. Outside was a
coconut scraper attached to a table, a screwpine tree and
curry leaf bush, and a well.

Mr. Illangasariya's mother, Geetha, was finishing up a fish
curry. In a clay pot, she had simmered tuna in a
turmeric-scented water and was combining the fish with
garlic, ginger, goraka, large slices of tomato and onion,
halved chilies and coconut milk. Kiri, the family's cat,
paced the kitchen complaining.

Mrs. Illangasariya then began filling the pittu maker.
Pittu pots are built like stove-top espresso makers: they
have a base for water and a tall cylindrical top, into
which the pittu mixture - rice flour, grated coconut, salt
and a dash of water - is tamped. The cylinder is then
attached to the base and steamed for about 10 minutes.

Mrs. Illangasariya pushed the pittu log out of the cylinder
onto a plate and, using a fiber from a coconut husk, sliced
it into hockey-puck-size pieces. "If you use a knife, the
pittu breaks," she said. "No knife."

WE sat down at a table set with brown glass plates turned
upside down. "So the flies don't land on them," Mr.
Illangasariya said as I turned mine over. The pittu pucks
were set on our plates, and we used our fingers to break
them up into pebbly bits. Following Mr. Illangasariya's
lead, I ladled a spoonful of warm coconut milk on top.

"It's first coconut milk," Mrs. Illangasariya said. On top
of our moistened pittu went the fish curry and katta
sambol. The food felt good to the touch: warm, oily, hot,
the chilies stinging your fingertips. Mrs. Illangasariya
and her husband, Sunil, circled the table as we ate,
inspecting our plates, insisting we have more; they had
prepared mounds of food. Hosts in Sri Lanka, they told me,
do not sit down with their dinner guests, and people rarely
speak while eating. (This is not always true of wealthier
Sri Lankans, who have servants.)

We had brought the Illangasariyas a bottle of toddy, the
palm spirit, which they received with some amusement. They
poured us each a glass. When we gestured for them to join
us, they politely refused. We tipped back our glasses and
discovered why. Toddy tastes like sour swill. Not
everything from nature here is splendid.

Better to stick to King coconut juice, or Three Coins Beer,
a good local lager, whose earnestly written label reads
"When consumed in moderation, Three Coins is an ideal
thirst quencher, a mild relaxant or an excellent lubricant
for social intercourse." Of course, in Sri Lanka, it's hard
to consume anything in moderation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/dining/13SRIL.html?ex=1098983023&ei=1&en=870d2d7537bd4d42

 

Links to Sri Lankan Recipes

Uma, here are some links to sites with Sri Lankan recipes and information. I hope they are helpful to you!

Sri Lankan Recipies

Sri lanka Recipes - Malini's Kitchen

Recipes - Sri Lankan Recipes (Sri Lanka)

Sri lankan Recipes at Food Down Under Recipe Database

Sri Lankan Cooking

Sri Lankan Curry Powder - miLagaai thooL. « V I R U N D H U

Enjoy!

 

Thosai

I hope this formats nicely here:


THOSAI </PRE>
</PRE>
Amount Measure Ingredient -- Preparation Method</PRE>
-------- ------------ --------------------------------</PRE>
250 g Black gram</PRE>
1/4 ts Fenugreek</PRE>
2 5 g onion</PRE>
1 Fresh chilli</PRE>
100 g Rice flour</PRE>
250 g Parboiled rice</PRE>
1 t Salt</PRE>
-pinch turmeric</PRE>
50 ml Oil</PRE>
-sprig curry leaves</PRE>
1 t Cumin</PRE>
</PRE>
Soak the black gram and tenugreek in water until soft.</PRE>
Chop the onion and chilli. Drain the gram and</PRE>
fenugreek and liquidise with the rice flour, rice and</PRE>
sufficient water to make a batter. Add the salt and</PRE>
turmeric. Heat 25 ml oil and fry onion, chilli, curry</PRE>
leaves and cumin, then add to the batter. Reheat the</PRE>
pan, add a little oil and pour in batter to make a</PRE>
thin pancake. When little holes appear on the thosai</PRE>
turn it over and cook on the other side for a minute</PRE>
or two. Repeat process until all the batter is used</PRE>
up. From "A taste of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Sri Lanka</st1lace></st1:country-region>" by Indra Jayasekera,</PRE>
ISBN #962 224 010 0</PRE>

 

Sri Lankan Curry Powder

(<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Sri Lanka</st1lace></st1:country-region>) Curry Powder
75 g/2 1/2 oz/1 cup coriander seeds
60 g/2 oz/1/2 cup cumin seeds
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
1 cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon whole cloves
1 teaspoon cardamom seeds
2 tablespoons dried curry leaves
2 teaspoons chilli powder (optional)
2 tablespoons ground rice (optional)


In a dry pan over low heat, roast separately the coriander, cumin, fennel and fenugreek, stirring constantly until each one becomes fairly dark brown. Do not let them burn. Put into a blender container together with cinnamon stick broken in pieces, cloves, cardamom and curry leaves. Blend on high speed until finely powdered. Combine with chilli powder and ground rice if used. Store in an airtight jar.