Sri Lankan

Where it comes from

Sri Lanka has sat on Indian Ocean trade routes for thousands of years, and grew cinnamon for most of them. Its everyday meal is rice and curry: a heap of rice with several dishes around it — a dal, a fish or meat curry, a few vegetables, a sambol — nearly all made with coconut.

Its cooking is close kin to South India's but its own: often hotter, heavy with black pepper, deepened with Maldive fish and soured with goraka, and built on curry powder roasted until dark. The Tamil north, around Jaffna, cooks differently again from the Sinhala south.

The Portuguese, then the Dutch, held the coasts, and the British the whole island until independence in 1948. The Burghers, of European descent, kept dishes like lamprais; the Malay and Muslim communities are credited with watalappan; and Tamil workers brought from South India under British rule to work the plantations made the hill country's cooking their own.

Where in it

1. ColomboThe capital and old port, where Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, Malay and Burgher cooking meet: lamprais baked in banana leaf, watalappan at Eid, and kottu clattering on griddles late into the night.Kottu rotiLampraisWatalappan
2. GalleThe fort town of the south coast. Southern cooking is known for fish soured with goraka and heavy with pepper — ambul thiyal was made to keep.Fish ambul thiyal
3. JaffnaThe Tamil north, on its own peninsula, cooks with a fiery roasted curry powder and the palmyra palm, and is known above all for crab curry from its lagoons.Jaffna crab curry
4. KandyThe last royal capital, in the hills. The tea estates around it have been worked for generations largely by Tamil families brought from South India under British rule.

How it cooks

Roasted curry powder

Coriander, cumin, fennel and more, roasted dark before grinding — what gives the island's 'black' curries their depth.

First and second milk

Grated coconut squeezed twice: the thin second milk to cook in, the thick first milk stirred in at the end.

Tempering

Onion, curry leaves, rampe and mustard seed fried in oil and poured over dal and vegetables.

Souring with goraka

Dried, smoky goraka rind, soaked and ground, for sourness that also helps a dish keep.

Sambol

Raw things pounded or rubbed together by hand — coconut, chilli, onion, lime — to eat with everything.

Always in the kitchen