Shakya and her mother Dulcie demonstrate Sri Lankan cooking in their Supper Club
Introducing authentic Sri Lankan cuisine to exotic British taste buds are a mother-daughter team in London who have been featured in the BBC for their efforts to popularize the traditional Sinhala style of cooking.
Shakya Manage who learnt cooking from her mother, Dulcie, is an avid blogger introducing cuisine native to the South Asian nation to other cultures and through her Sri Lankan Supper Club she cooks before an audience inviting them to savour the culinary delights she prepares with her mother.
“British tourists who visit Sri Lanka have some idea of the island’s cuisine and many of them attend our Supper Club. We demonstrate how to cook Sri Lankan food to about a dozen enthusiastic foodies in the weekends using our vegetables, herbs and spices using traditional clay pots, coconut ladles and coconut scrapers and share the food with them,” Shakya told a Sri Lankan website.
They also popularize Lankan food through other platforms like Brunch Club, Spring Supper and Vegan Cook Club. “The hot favourites among the British are our traditional lentil curry, pol sambol and pol roti,” says Shakya.
She says some people mistakenly believe that Sri Lankan food is a part of Indian cuisine. She says in her blog that Sri Lankan food is quite different from the fare of its giant neighbour, adding that ‘I want to change this perception. Sri Lankan cuisine uses a variety of roasted spices and the odd splash of coconut milk which is different from the Indian cuisine’. She says Indian curries are tasty but use lot of oil and some taste rough on the palate.
Shakya left for England as a kid of two years along with her family when her dad went to work there as a lawyer. Her mother told Sri Lankan website Ada (Today) “Shakya did visit Sri Lanka when she was 12 years old. After her first visit she took part in a Channel 5 programme in which kids growing up in England talk about their experience when they visit their home countries for the first time.”
Shakya is a graduate of the University College of London with a post graduate degree and works for the British government.
It all began when she went to the university hostel to follow her degree at the age of 18. “My mother used to cook Sri Lankan style food since we were kids. When I went to stay at the hostel I missed her food. So, I telephoned her and got the recipes and began to cook in the hostel. It took some time for me to master the art with trial and error. When I came home I cooked what I tried in the hostel. My parents tasted them without complaining, and then I knew my cooking was perfect,” she said. Shakya has an elder sister.
Twenty years ago, when her family came to England it was difficult to source many authentic Sri Lankan ingredients and utensils. Her parents had to do everything from scratch like drying their own chillies for chilli powder, making their own rice flour and blending together the right spices to make curry powders. All the utensils such as clay pots, hopper pans and coconut grinders were brought from Sri Lanka.
“The internet has made it much more accessible to source these things online now, but as Ammie (mother) says ‘seasoned utensils are always the best to cook with’. I’m sure many of you from ethnic backgrounds can also appreciate how precious food from our home country is to us. So much so, that returning from a ‘holiday’ form our home country we arrive with suitcases bursting with packaged food. Bags of deep-fried fish, curry leaves picked from gardens, coconut oil squeezed by hand – and possibly the most dubious looking fresh sea salt bagged up!” Shakya says in her blog.
Her blog offers many recipes for supper, short eats, sweet treats, staples and breakfast. Some of her mouth-watering and nutritious Sri Lankan recipes include coconut chicken curry, coconut sambol, egg curry, stir-fried beetroot leaves, lamb and wild rice biriyani, green chicken curry, cauliflower and lentil curry, okra stir fry, mackerel and chilly fish cake and authentic Sri Lankan fish curry.
During a recent vacation to Sri Lanka she found out that the restaurants there are using many artificial ingredients to flavour the curries. “One day I had string hoppers and coconut gravy for breakfast and my fingers and teeth turned yellow. The food also tasted salty with too much onions in them. Usually they mix sugar to seeni sambol in Sri Lanka but we don’t do that when we cook at home. Onions have natural sugar to bring that mild sweetness. If we cook slowly we are able retain the natural colours of the vegetables. I also have heard that in Sri Lanka they are now using palm oil and cow fat ghee, instead of natural ghee.”
She says ‘we use coconut oil for our dishes and flavour curry with natural spices like cardamom, cloves, rampe leaves and curry leaves without using any artificial ingredients or flavours’.
“Coconut oil has become very popular in the west due to its health benefits becoming a super-food and now even toothpaste uses it as an ingredients. In England some people even keep coconuts in fruit baskets,” Shakya says.
The difference in Sri Lankan cooking is its dependence on natural ingredients and traditional methods of cooking in tempered clay pots, say the mother and daughter, adding that there are all kinds of Sri Lankan vegetable, herbs and spices available in South Asian groceries in London making things easy for them. – www.newstrails.com
