FEAST

Milk, Spice and Curry Leaves encapsulates one woman's Sri Lankan heritage

Growing up in Port Coquitlam, B.C., Ruwanmali Samarakoon- Amunugama scoured bookstore shelves for any trace of Sri Lankan cookery. There was none. She has been documenting her family's hill country recipes since she was a teenager, cooking at her mother's side in Canada and learning from her grandmother during trips to Kandy, Sri Lanka. Now, more than two decades after the seed was planted, the spine of her own book, Milk, Spice and Curry Leaves (TouchWood Editions, 2020), is a step towards filling the void.

“It's such an acknowledgement to a community. It's not just about the food — it's so much more,” says Samarakoon-Amunugama. “That's the place I wanted on that bookshelf. It was in my mind. I wanted there to be a spot for this book to represent Sri Lankan Canadian food.”

No matter where they lived in Canada — first Ontario, then Alberta and B.C. — her mother created a sense of togetherness through the flavours of Kandy. Without customary cooking tools and often even specific ingredients, Samarakoon-Amunugama recalls, she adapted. When making ambul thiyal (sour fish curry), for example, which her grandmother cooked in a banana-leaf-lined clay pot over an open hearth, her mother uses a lightly oiled covered casserole dish instead, and bakes it slowly in the oven.

Samarakoon-Amunugama was once intimidated by her now-late grandmother's kitchen in Peradeniya, Kandy — where she would make ghee using fresh milk from her herd, ginger preserves with roots from her garden, and coconut roti out of fruit plucked from her trees. “I would peek in and it was very mysterious to me, because it was completely different from a Western kitchen. My mind felt like a camera. I just started to watch.”

A lush region, the slopes of hill country are covered in tea plants and produce an abundance of fruit and vegetables, which Samarakoon-Amunugama's grandfathers grew. These fresh ingredients — such as beets, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, jackfruit, leeks, peas, potatoes and pumpkin — characterize hill country cooking, she explains, along with the Sri Lankan pillars of coconut, rice and spices.

Suthu ala curry (white potato curry), with its naked creaminess, is a typical regional dish, she says. “There is a very unique taste you get when you make a potato curry, for example, and you have that mild coconut milk coloured with the turmeric and then the squeeze of lime. To me, that's a very hill country recipe. That bit of sour with the creaminess and a nicely cooked vegetable.”

She still has the first notebook she used to record her mother's recipes. “I'll probably always keep it. I'll probably always reference that versus the real book. Because I just started jotting the notes down and writing the measurements out. And I would say, `Amma, no. What is that? How much was that cayenne? How much turmeric did you put in?' `I don't know, that's just how you do it,'” says Samarakoon-Amunugama, with a laugh, of her mother's reply.

Realizing she had to watch her mother carefully in order to glean the amounts — “she was never going to tell me, `Oh, it was a teaspoon of this or that' — Samarakoon-Amunugama started paying attention to the finer details. It was important to her to document the full picture, fleshed out as much as possible for posterity. “The way she would cut a vegetable. The way she would use the curry leaf. The way she would temper an ingredient,” she says. “I didn't have the language for it, but I just started observing her.”

When she began writing Milk, Spice and Curry Leaves — even in its earliest iterations — she saw it as a memoir and letter of gratitude to her mother.

“To tell her that everything that she went through as a first-generation Canadian, and all the feelings that accompany that experience — the feelings of loss and grief and isolation when you emigrate and come to a new country — all of that was not for naught,” she says. “This is so much about her and my grandmother, so I want her to see herself in that, too. Because I think for firstgen, sometimes they can be lost in the experience of immigration.”

Milk, Spice and Curry Leaves joins only a handful of other English-language Sri Lankan cookbooks. In Canada, previous projects have largely been community-driven, says Samarakoon-Amunugama.

She takes pride in the fact that most Sri Lankans will be able to find dishes they recognize from their youth in Milk, Spice and Curry Leaves. In Sri Lanka, elders showed visually how to make a dish or a spice blend — traditional cooking and family recipes were passed on through observation. Displacement due to rising tensions in the 1970s and the ensuing civil war from 1983 to 2009 disrupted the passage of knowledge.

“That kind of teaching was altered when there was a generation that left the country around the time of the war. The first generation particularly — the diasporas that were in Canada, U.S., U.K. or Australia — and then the second generation like me. You're going through the acculturation with your parents growing up in this country. But you didn't have family around you to learn the way the recipes were made,” says Samarakoon-Amunugama.

“Food does so much more than just feed. It builds communities. It builds relationships. It strengthens our sense of belonging. And that's why, to see a book on a bookshelf — it's about belonging. It's about belonging within a community.”