If you want to get to the real cultural heart of a country, immerse yourself in a local cooking class, writes Anna King Shahab
When it comes to understanding the cuisine of the country, you can eat in as many restaurants, roadside stalls, lunch canteens or markets as you like, but helping to cook and then eating dinner in a family home in a country you’re a visitor in, offers a real insider perspective. Cooking dinner with a local Sinhalese family in Sri Lanka’s second-largest city Kandy was a highlight of a recent Intrepid group tour I joined.
Set around a beautiful lake in Sri Lanka’s Central Highlands, Kandy was the ancient capital; it’s home to sacred Buddhist sites and surrounded by tea-growing country. After driving a fair distance throughout the day, a quick refresh in the hotel pool (the gilt-filled, befitting-of-its-name Grand Kandyan sits majestically on top of one of the city’s hills – the view with your swim is amazing) and a local arak and lime cocktail had me refreshed and ready to learn. Our group of eight along with our brilliant local tour guide Dodan arrived at the home of Kolitha, Deepthi and their teenage daughters Chamodi and Dilumi. The family welcomed us with tea and sweets served on the balcony. The tea was BOPF – that’s Broken Orange Pekoe Fannings, a high-quality Ceylon tea with a small leaf size resulting in a strong brew. The treats were homemade thala guli, a Ceylon-style bliss ball made with date, sesame seeds, and jaggery – one of us enquired about the latter ingredient and Dodan pointed to a crop of the tall variety of palm tree from which jaggery – a type of palm sugar popularly used in Sri Lankan cuisine – is extracted (this question was a among endless ones we threw at Dodan over our time touring with him, and even the curlier ones he would answer confidently, filling our knowledge boots to overflowing on a daily basis).
Progressing to the outdoor kitchen adjoining the petite but impeccably organised indoor one, I was reminded of the great tradition in homes I’ve visited throughout Asia of separating types of cooking according to technique (rather risky to get a huge flame under a wok, or light a wood fire indoors), and also to the potential of an aroma to linger. Kolitha instructed our group in cooking a classic chicken curry: grinding and combining spices, coconut milk and lime juice to marinate chicken pieces (we worried for a minute that Dan, our tour buddy and nominated marinade-massager, was going to infuse DEET flavour into the curry but happily this didn’t occur). The curry then cooked away in its clay pot over a periodically stoked wood fire as we moved into the indoor kitchen to continue our hands-on cooking demo.
