HONOURING THE FLAVOURS OF SRI LANKA

Cookbook author shares recipes made by her mother, grandmother

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 late grandmother during trips to Kandy, Sri Lanka.

More than two decades after the seed was planted, the spine of her own book, Milk, Spice & Curry Leaves (TouchWood Editions, 2020), is a step toward filling the void. “It's such an acknowledgment 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 finally 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 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”: coconut, rice and spices.

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,'” Samarakoon-Amunugama recalls, laughing.

Realizing she had to watch carefully to glean the amounts, Samarakoon-Amunugama started paying more attention. 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 & Curry Leaves, 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 first-gen, sometimes they can be lost in the experience of immigration.”

ANOTHER SRI LANKAN DISH A12