21 JUN 2018: The food is what I remember and miss the most about Sri Lanka. The country has an abundance of all the things I love to eat: spices, curries, seafoods and fresh produce. Some of the spices, such as the real cinnamon, are special to the island. As to the curries, you can have them at breakfast, lunch and dinner. And we did.

The spices were introduced to Sri Lanka by traders from the Arab world and the country embraced them with fervour. A typical Sri Lankan breakfast is a coconut-milk based curry with a fiery coconut sambal to mix in and spice it up even more. To soothe the heat, rice based dishes such as hoppers or string hoppers accompany the meal.

A hopper is a wafer-thin, bowl shaped pancake made from a batter of coconut milk, rice flour and a dash of palm toddy. Fry an egg in the middle of a hopper and you have an egg hopper – tastier and healthier than any egg McMuffin.

String hoppers are made by squeezing rice flour dough through a sieve so it makes thin vermicelli noodles. The cooked noodles end up woven together like little nests. Other rice dishes include milk rice, made with thick coconut cream and dense enough to cut into wedges, and pittu made by steaming fresh rice meal with roasted and grated coconut in a bamboo mould so it comes out roll shaped.

Sri Lanka boasts over 200 varieties of rice. My favourite was the nutritious reddish-brown Ma- Wee rice. Low in carbohydrates, and rich in protein and fibre – it tasted nutty and wholesome. Ma-Wee has been proven to have a 25% to 30% lower glycemic index (GI) than other common rice varieties. I heard that Ma-Wee was loved by the queens of Sri Lanka for its properties that helped them maintain a trim, shapely figure.

This heirloom variety of rice, grown in the lowland areas through rainfed cultivation, is unique to Sri Lanka. Lower yielding compared to new hybrid varieties, it’s time and labour intensive to grow and harvest. According to the Slow Food Foundation, only about 20 or so smallholder groups grow the heirloom rice today. It’s a pity it’s not more widely available as it’s said to minimize the effects of diabetes, improve bladder functioning, and help with reducing the effect of alcohol.

Another health boosting food available at breakfast is the herbal soup kola kanda. Made from brown or red rice, coconut milk and herbal leaves such as gotukola, penela and hathawariya it’s taken on an empty stomach prior to tucking into a meal. Served hot with a piece of jaggery (palm sugar) it’s said to be particularly good for those with arthritis. Every time I had it I felt super charged with health and vigour. (The herb, gotukola, is known for its healing and anti-inflammatory qualities and is also thought to improve memory, anxiety and depression.)

Ancient food habits in Sri Lanka emphasised the importance of taking a balanced and nutritious diet. The right kind of food to eat was derived from their study of Ayurveda. The main theme in Ayurveda is keeping the body healthy and preventing the onset of diseases by sane and rational living. How far we have diverged from that practice in most modernized countries!

During my stay at Serene Pavilions, a beautiful ocean side property near Wadduwa on the south west coast, I went with Chef Ruwan Chandana to the local market. I was thrilled at the incredible array of fruits and vegetables, many of which I had not seen or eaten before. Among the tropical fruits were diul (wood apple), annona (sour sop), bael fruit, durian, goraka, Ceylon oak, tamarind and multiple varieties of bananas.  Vegetables included bitter gourd, snake gourd, breadfruit, tapioca root, grape sized thibbatu melon (tiny wild eggplant), kankun (Asian water spinach), plantain flower, and all kinds of herbal leaves considered to have medicinal properties.

Chef graciously purchased whatever I was keen to try, including a range of dried fish, fresh fish and bags of produce. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a roadside stand selling live lagoon crabs and added these to our purchases. At the hotel, Chef Ruwan cooked up a miniature banquet for my husband and I for dinner. It was a spectacular meal and unlike any I had experienced elsewhere in the world.

Basic rice and curry is a ubiquitous dish served up island wide. A more sophisticated version, such as Chef presented us, is available in the better hotels and restaurants and is said to be inspired by the Indonesian nasi padang, transformed by the Dutch into rijsttafel (rice table) and introduced to Sri Lanka in the eighteenth century. It’s a serving of meat or seafood curry (fish, shrimp, lobster or crab), along with dhal (lentil curry), and often over a dozen stir fried and curry vegetable dishes.

Accompanying this meal are sambols, a spicy mixture that often gets its body and texture from grated fresh coconut. Hot peppers, shrimp paste, fish sauce, garlic, ginger, shallot, scallion, palm sugar, lime juice, and rice vinegar are common ingredients. In our case Chef Ruwan made three versions: pol sambol (coconut), onion sambol and a mint sambol.

Devilled dishes were another stable I found throughout the island. These are prepared with a thick, spicy sauce with chunks of onion, sweet peppers and chilli. Chicken, pork, beef and fish can all be served devilled.

As to the spirit of Sri Lanka, I discovered their arrack, made from the distilled sap (toddy) of coconut palms, to be divine. To collect the sap, a tapper climbs to the top of the palm and cuts the flower. Tapping toddy commercially involves traversing a network of interlinked coconut trees called an athura, connected by tightrope, which the toddy tapper uses to walk from one treetop to the next. Dangerous height-defining work. Containers are fastened to the flower stump to collect the sap, much like we do when we tap maple trees but done sky high.

The collected toddy is then fermented and distilled into arrack. The result is delicious, special and unique as is most all of what you get on the plate and in the glass on this verdant island.