READING NOOK/OPINION
Mary Anne Mohanraj missed a lot of things when she went off to college, but the thing she was most homesick for was her mother’s cooking.
When her parents immigrated to Connecticut from Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1973, they brought with them their fiery curries, coconut sambols and countless rice dishes.
Mohanraj remembers sitting in her dorm room at the University of Chicago so desperately hungry for her mother’s beef and potato curry that she begged for the recipe over the phone. Once in hand, “I made it over and over again,” she says, because that was the only way she could get to eat one.
Back in the 1990s, Sri Lankan restaurants were nonexistent even in culturally diverse cities like Chicago because the small number of Sri Lankans who started arriving in the United States in the mid-1950s tended to be professionals. “There weren’t a lot of cooks coming in to set up restaurants,” Mohanraj notes.
Even today, Sri Lankan food is hard to come by outside of New York City and parts of New Jersey,
making the food unfamiliar to most. That’s a shame, because as Mohanraj’s new cookbook, “A Feast of Serendib: Recipes From Sri Lanka” (Mascot Books, $40), makes clear, the cuisine’s distinctive curries, sambols, hoppers (a type of pancake) and vinegar-based pickles are as vivid as they are flavorful.
Colonized first by the Portuguese and then the Dutch and British, Sri Lanka has been a multiethnic society for more than 1,000 years. The food reflects those influences, with dishes like frikkadels (a type of Dutch meatball), Portuguese “love cake” (made with nuts and spices) and brandy-infused British fruit cake on the menu.
Sri Lankan food sometimes is described as a mix between Southern Indian and Thai flavors. Yet Mohanraj stresses it’s definitely not what most Americans are used to eating when they go out for Indian food. While the two nations share many of the same ingredients, Sri Lankan food is usually hotter than the creamy curries and butter masalas that are a staple of Northern Indian cooking.
Learning an unfamiliar cuisine can be overwhelming, so when Mohanraj started writing the cookbook in 2015, she opted for a “hand holdy” format geared to home cooks such as herself. Nothing’s too fancy, most ingredients are easily sourced and the recipes are easy to follow, with many including italicized notes offering substitutions, helpful cooking hints or playful family remembrances.
Many of the 100-plus recipes are family favorites that she started gathering more than 20 years ago as a college student to put into a book as a Christmas present for her mother. Others came from friends or were discovered during years of meticulous research and testing in her home kitchen.
“I didn’t want to have just the things my family makes, but core recipes are from within the Sri Lankan community,” she says. They include everything from salads, condiments and drinks to desserts, egg and meat dishes, and nearly two dozen curries.