GASTRONOMICALLY speaking, it is true that in Ceylon everything begins with rice. There should be no surprise if everything appeared to end with rice. Between beginning and end a somewhat insistent impression may arise that nearly everything is rice. That also would be a true proposition. For that ancient cereal is a fundamental, a staple, a universal. There are meats, and there is fish: but they are dependencies, mere colonies subserving the great empire of rice. That they and other attendant and subsidiary products exist for, and because of, the rice, no one has denied : not even the ancient mystics who fasted for months, not even the holy seers with the astral bodies who had no use at all for eating, subsisting, as they did, on nothing.
Professor Haeckel, that inveterate materialist, put the matter thus. He wrote that the Sinhalese man’s vision of heaven was that of a place provided with an infinite supply of rice and curry. He might have added that the rice was a steaming rice and the curry pretty hot stuff. On the greedy man’s map of Ceylon, which we shall print and publish when all is well, there will be marked down all the resthouses of all the provincial and district road committees. The resthouse is a speciality of the Ceylon soil. It is Ceylon’s own proper and peculiar symbol of the earthly needs of travellers . Resthouses, being human and so sometimes prone to err, have on occasion failed to discharge their offices, the rice running short and the curry not yielding enough to go round. Professor Haeckel would have no mistakes of that sort in the celestial and enternal resthouse. By a happy fitness of things, the rice and curry, thank heaven, is infinite, infinite.
We are not going to pick a hole in Professor Haeckel’s theology : we are more then content that there is none to pick in his rice. Notice, please, that he has put the great thing in its proper order. The lawful sequence: rice and curry. Too many amateurs there are, too many beginners and elementary students of the diet, who call for their curry and rice, and proceed to assimilate that mean and trifling composition while angels weep. With knife and fork they encompass their fell deed. O woeful fallacy of eating ! O foolish and vain putting of cart before horse ! O most ignoble hysteron proteron! The elect, the chosen race, the meal and the manner born, can have no truck with that base perversion. In the language of the gods, the name and style of the stuff remains fixed : rice and curry. Work is with the spoon. There is an even handier and more apposite implement : the fingers, which the gods had specially designed for the intake of rice by reason of their sensitive comprehension. Before the Industrial Revolution, before the invention of gun—powder, before the Fall, there functioned the fingers.
If eating is the thing (and it is the thing), then even the Mahawamsa, or the Ancient Chronicle of Ceylou, is an eater’s handbook. Making a collation of those important and pertinent parts and leaving out of account the giant architecture as of secondary importance. salute rice and curry as the be-all and end-all. The menus in the Mahawamsa provide a boiled rice, a crushed rice, a rice-gruel, a rice mixed with honey, a milk rice (auspicious and propitious thing) and (the Mahawamsa writer hurries over it impatiently, his lips moistening) ‘all kinds of cakes’, the offspring of the ‘onlie begetter’, rice. There is a menu in one place of ‘dishes full of the finest rice prepared with sweet milk, with heaps of food composed of sweet-smelling rice white in colour like to the Kelasa mountain.’ No doubt, when the eater heaped his portion on his plate, the pile also was like to the Kelasa mountain. For a sweet there was ‘sour and sweet milk, butter milk, honey, treacle, thickened sugar juice.’ For dessert: ‘golden bananas, rose-apples, mangoes, date plums, oranges, pomegranates, grapes.’ The Mahawamsa chefs notably distinguished ‘foods hard and soft’ and ‘dishes solid and tender’. The Mahawamsa butlers well knew the difference between ‘drinks one sips and those one drinks.’ On that morsel which was like to the Kelasa mountain the giants went out and built their wondrous edifices. The works have passed away. People continue to eat. Men are we, as Mr. Wordsworth remarked, and must eat even when the shade of that which once was great is passed away.
Captain Robert Knox, that distinguished prisoner taken by the Sinhalese, is witness to the continuity of their eating. He records a custom which is testimony of the primacy of rice :
‘If people be in the room talking togather, the woman being ready to put the rice into the pot bids them all be silent till she put in, and then they may proceed with their discourse.’
To the rice is due an undivided attention.
‘For if they should talk while the rice is putting in, it would not swell.’
Mr. Knox then commends one permanent concomitant of rice: Lemon Sauce, or Dehi Achcharu. And so to the ‘several sorts of sweetmeats’:
‘One they call Caown. It is like to a fritter made of rice-flower and Jaggory. They make them up in little lumps, and lay them down on a leaf, and then press these up with their thumbs and put them in the frying-pen and fry them in Coker-nut Oyl or Butter. When the Dutch came first to Columba the King ordered this Caown to be made and sent to them as a royal treat. The Dutch did so admire them, that they asked if they grew not apon Trees, supposing it past the Art of man to make such dainties.’
The Dutch came to Ceylon out of hatred of the Portuguese. The Dutch stayed on in Ceylon out of love of Caown. It was a tribute to the national cake of Ceylon. On our map we must mark Caown all over the land.
Next to Caown, Knox placed
‘Oggulas, another sort of sweet-meats, made of parched Rice, Jaggory, Pepper, cardamum and a little Cinamons. They rowl them up in Balls which will grow hard…Then Alloways, made after the former manner, only they flat in the fashion of a Lozenge. Then Yacpettias, made from Rice-flower, and the meat of the Cokernut and Jaggory. They are made into small lumps and so put in a leaf, and laid on a cloth over a Pot of boyling water, the steam of which is laid apon it; and so they are sodeen like pudding. They taste like white bread, Almones and Sugar.’
Then on to Pitu,
‘Which is made thus: They take the flower of Coracan and sprinkle a little water into it, being both put into a large pot for the purpose. Then they stir and rowl it in the Pot, by which means it crumbles into corns like Gunpowder.’
Quaint and ancient spelling. Idiom and transcription of vernacular sounds, but the recipe and the taste are true. The Oggulas are Asiatic relations of the British popcorn. The Alloways done with cashew-nuts, thrive enormously in Negambo. With Pitu the story is that the devil himself was tempted and trapped.
But we must go back to the rice. We have not done with the rice. It would also be a salutary reminder that we cannot do without the rice. If the rice is eaten in the orthodox manner, that is, if it is really and truly everything, let the eater prepare for the dozen or more concomitants which attend upon that central dish. Assemble the curries, meat and fish; place in full view the vegetable auxiliaries, some curried and liquid, others mellums and dry; summon fish dried or fried in onion; call up curried eggs; forget not the sambols and chutnies and the little piquant sauces and preserves. With full honours let there be brought in the curried chicken which is the crown and glory of the eating and serves In th, office of Prime Minister to His Majesty. There is a white rice, and a yellow; the yellow is the heavier, richer, and more magnificent in spicery. Exotic but full of blandishments, there are the other miracles in rice: the burianis and the pilaus, with collops of mutton or chicken and Scotch eggs stowed away under the tempting mound and the surface of the mountain itself prinked with raisins and cardamoms as daisies prink a meadow. Kandyans perform the rite, one curry at a time with the rice; Muhammadans, those apostles of brotherhood, dig into and feed, the whole company, all from one enormous common and central dish; the Low Country mixes concomitants, each eater upon his proper platter. Of many colours and conditions are curries; red and yellow, sombre and pale, black and white, saucey and dry, hot and very hot, angelic and devilled.
There is a Beef Smore (curry) which moves mountains. Shallots and garlic and green ginger and cinnamon and rampa leaf and lemon-grass and coriander and cumin and vinegar and fenugreek and pickled lime and saffron and red chillies and ghee the best of an ox have gone to make this thing. But to recite these constituents in a special manner is to do other curries an injustice, for no gentlemanly curry can have savour or flavour without the suffrages of a dozen ingredients. There is a curry with a thickish gravy they call karamanachchi, a name suggesting an old lady of Tamil race, with such a delicate homeliness she turns up on the plate and is a name to conjure with. Of this distinctive curry note its unmistakable feature : the meat cut up into little squares and skewered on pieces of ekel (or stick) three inches long. each ekel acconmodating four pieces. If and when the great Lamprey Curry is served, time is to thank heaven for the Dutch occupation of Ceylon, for the nation which set up dikes nd beat the sea also imitated the practice here of a curry into which all meats enter and live in peace. As if the conglomerate fowl and mutton and beef and pork sufficed not, the Dutch Mynheer ordered his chef to push in prawns as well.
To Hollandish inspiration is due an even greater debt; that composite thing of rice and curries called Lampreys, that compactum among eatables which serves to remind the eater that life is a journey. For the Lamprey is a parcel or package, and holds a proper portion of ghee, rice, helpings of curries here and there upon the surface, a portion of ground chilli sambol into which by a delicious effrontery there has been added even sugar, a bit or appetizing chutney, and a suggestion of pickle. Among these curries recognize the fricadels which are little balls of meat looking like marbles, pepper, salt, cloves and cinnamon entering with a zest into their structure. The parcel is wrapped in pieces of plantain leaf folded up into an oblong and fastened at the end with an ekel. The Lampreys served arrive like so many green parcels sent out in the Dutch period from Wolfendhaal. You eat one parcel, then another further it would be impolite to count…. Love of your neighbour would move you to keep your eye off the plantain leaves, folded out and reft of contents, lying one upon the other on his plate.
It is a pity that history is too much at pains to record what abominable politicians do, and not what their masters, the people, eat. The soul of the people (we believe) is in what they eat. In the rice and curry a la Cingalaise the soul of the people is pungently, piquantly expressed. In equal richness and elaboration there is also a rice and curry a la Tamoule, the fare which the great Tamil race live and thrive on. Arabs and Moors and Malays have come and made their delicacies current in the land of their domicile. Indian races also have added their distinctive features. Please inquire what they mean by Bombay ducks. Borahs specialize in godumba roti a creation of eggs and flour which demands the digestion of strong souls grappling with Fate. There’s a Malay style of currying a fowl according to which the whole bird, drawn and trussed as for roasting, goes to pot and returns transmogrified beyond words. Perhaps it is only in the strong Malay language that any adequate appreciation could be rendered, The Muslim is a sweet-tooth. He has a pudding called wattilliappam, a soft, succulent one of jaggery and eggs and all the spices of earth which goes down with a demure sweetness like that of the houris in Paradise. And there need be no ugly scramble for the dish, for there are available bowls and bowls of the sweetmeat, a full bowl per person. Never were such layers dispensed with such understanding. Then the Portuguese and the Dutch came; one may not remember their administration, but one cannot forget their influenee on eating. The Dutch initiated a curry puff which, called by the misnomer ‘patty’, survives and is the staple of all Ceylon At Homes’. They bequeathed also as their legacy the confections still so popular, the borowas, the brooders, the poffertijes, and the ijzer koekjes. (Proverb: you cannot eat your koekje and have it). The Portuguese before them had left behind bolos de coco, bolos fiados, fuggettis, and pentefritos. They also gave a hearty approval to that permanent thing of delight: pumpkin preserve. To that delicacy even the Bombay Mittai (that gossamer-like creation) and the muscat of the Coast Moors must yield place.
It is a certificate to the tolerance of the last corners, the British, that they did not make it a criminal offence for Ceylonesc to habitually murder one of their commonest English words. That word is breakfast. According to accepted notions breakfast in Ceylon is had at mid-day, when such tremendous engines as string-hoppers and mulligatawny or coco-nut sambal, or baked hoppers and chilli samba!, milk rice and plantain or honeyed hoppers and jaggery, have already operated to break the fast five or six hours earlier. With great good humour the unprotesting British threw in their famous eggs and bacon (the bacon which was responsible for Shakespeare !) and that king of all the world’s tables, their ham, and so added weight to the Ceylon morning meal. To the Ceylon breakfast and dinner they donated Mrs. Beeton’s grand daughter’s Cookery Book. Occidentalized Ceylonese now eat at those meals both of the West and the East; it is hard work and too fraught with danger, and occidentalized Cey!onese rein-force their avoirdupois and sleep with their fathers at fifty.
Then the british established the conventions of their Mother of Parliments, but that gift pales in importance before their establishment and gift of the convention of Afternoon Tea. The British taught the drinking of tea; they grew the tea; they saw to it that the tea was the best tea in the world; and they set up that slogan flaunted in mighty electric letters in the Colombo harbour right in the eyes of the seven seas -’Ceylon For the Best Tea.’ On all hand, it should be admitted that dear old Dr. Johnson, who drank his thirty consecutive caps of bohea, would have registered his sixty in Ceylon’s Golden tips.
There is perfect tropica1 abundance of fruits in Ceylon. Its good, by the way, to note that the Ceylon fruit has been, worthier of a better fate than to be tagged on as a tail-piece to the end of a meal. Ceylon dessert is had at any time. We must pick out of plenty a mere few which challenge the notions of other countries. So learn that an orange may be green and continue to be green to the day of its old age and extinction, but it is at the same time a globe of sweetness inside to those who do not judge by colour. There is a suave and luscious mango : ancient geo-graphers described the shape of Ceylon as comparable to the mango. This also is green for the whole sum of its mortal days and, called the Jaffna Mango, it is conspicuous by its absence in Jaffna, It prospers in other parts. The Jaffnese come down from Jaffna to eat it, eat with relish, and settle down in the south for ever. Ancient tradition (which demands that one should not try to teach one’s grandmother to suck mangoes) prescribes sucking as the national mode of acquaintance with the mango. In any case, even with plate, knife and spoon real appreciators eat a round dozen, or none. Then let’s have a banana. Mr Robert Lynd, who has not seen the Ceylon banana but speaks from knowledge of the West Indian one, has decided that eatin banana is like assimilating blotting-paper. But Mr. E. V. Lucas who paid a visit here has left the message that there is a banana in Ceylon (meaning the Co1icuutu) which to eat once is to turn up a nose of unspeakable contempt for all the rest of the world’s banana-kind. But even Mr. Lucas drew the line at mangoes which he writ down as sponges dipped in turpentine. Mangos-teen, on the other hand, Mr. Lucas wrote, has the most exquisite of all the flavours in the world. Grown in the Gardens of the Sun in Kalutara, they may still be taken up to Olympus some day. Meanwhile, the fruit is symbolized on the escutcheon of Kalutara, and on the palate yields a concentrated sweetness.
And so to the greedy man’s map. Mr. Chesterton has written of old father Noah that his soup was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was Whale. If Noah had landed his Ark on Mount Pedro, Ceylon’s jungles and seas would have produced him, his menu. For the smaller appetites of his modern representatives there is the seer fish in the western seas (Mr. Lucas called the seer a poor relation of the turbot, but he is not so poor). There are heaven-sent crabs at Negombo; there are the best of oysters at Bentota; lobsters are in attendance to the north, and turtles to the south; there are fish off Puttlam which God made to be dried and salted and translated into karawadu, while fish lying off Moratuwa, going to pickle and preserve, attain immortality as moju. In the wildernesses of the south, east, and north-west. venison and wild boar more than compensate the bother of the kill; overhead in the inland parts, teal and partridge and other fowl hover for a space and then on the report of a gun descend to earth and the table.
The Sinhalese favour the coco-nut tree, and the Tamils the palmyrah; the results are equal, and there is arrack, toddy, jaggery and honey on both trees. If northerly Jaffna boasts cigars (and devilish strong they are) southerly Matara is purveyor of celestial curds. Kandy, in a distinctive Kandyan jaggery, creates works of art; Peradeniya makes a cocoa; Nuwara Eliya, a beer; Baddegama an indigenous sugar. At Wattala pork abounds to be eaten with coco-nut and pickle; on the golden road to Kandy cashew-nut are cried out for sale; at Balapitiya a blood-fish turns up who makes an anechovy like appetizer called jadi,. Galle gets its name from gallus, Latin for cock; from Galle one naturally expects to return in fair round belly with good capon lived. At Batticaloa the fish not only taste but also sing. There is boiled fruit of the palmyrah featured in Trincomalee.
A leisurely man, master of his time, goes eating his way through the land from resthouse to resthouse. A man with a few hours to spare can hurry the six miles south of Colombo to Mount Lavania, absorb the famous fish tiffins, and get back in time. A man who has no choice but merely to step ashore can get all in Colombo, summoning the specialities to jump distance and appear before him. If Mr. E. V. Lucas has sampled the fare and left an opinion on record, so did lbn Batuta two hundred years before the Portuguese. We close with the testimony of the older connoisseur and gourmet :
‘On plantain leaves is served the rice which is their staple, On the rice they stow the curries, piquant with seasoning; fowl, flesh, fish and vegetable.’
