Cynthia Shanmugalingam shares a taste of Sri Lanka – By Cynthia Shanmugalingam

My Mum – alongside almost everyone else in my Sri Lankan family – seems to have been born knowing just what fruit, veg, fish, meat, spices and rice to buy, when everything is in season, and how to turn it all into the wonderful Sri Lankan fare that they eat every day. Unlike them, I have had to learn a different way.

When my parents left the island in the 1960s to live in England, they didn’t know that on the flight, thousands of years of culinary knowledge would be evaporated into thin air. Alongside my brother and sister, I could never quite pick up everything they knew ‘back home’. And yet, I have learned how to make Sri Lankan food that is just as delicious as any I have eaten.

Get the recipe for Cynthia Shanmugalingam’s Sri Lankan turmeric omelette here. 

Rambutan is the story of an immigrant kid in England trying to cook her way out of the profound sense of loss about the place her parents called home. It contains the best recipes from my mum, grandmother and all the other generous aunties and friends who gave them to me, sometimes modified a little to make them easier, or because they seemed more fun that way, but always retaining the ancient spirit of Sri Lankan cuisine.

I have not shied away from the country’s often painful history of war, colonial oppression, slavery, spice trading, poverty and proselytising. These, too, are part of the story of our food. Rather than dimming the ingenuity and creativity of the island’s cooks, in successive generations, our ancestors created Sri Lanka’s culinary songbook. They combined the Javanese, Malay, Indian, Arab, Portuguese, African, Dutch and British influences that came into the island with Tamil, Sinhalese and indigenous cooking. Using both native ingredients to the island (like cinnamon, curry leaves and cassava) as well as ingredients brought in by its visitors (like chillies, tomatoes and cashew nuts), the result has been a delicious, unique food tradition that is completely our own, and – if I do say so myself – one of the world’s most unsung cuisines. I have been lucky to stuff my face with this food all my life, cooked for me, before I learned to cook it myself, by my mum, my grandmother and other absurdly hardworking Sri Lankans like them, almost always women.

Get the recipe from Rambutan for tempered crunchy fried potatoes with turmeric here. 

Sri Lanka’s different communities – Tamil, Sinhala, Muslim, Burgher and others – and its different regions, all have different cooking styles and specialities, and over a lifetime of travelling back to Sri Lanka and eating at home, I have been able to sample almost all of them and to learn their recipes.  When I went to university, my parents moved back to Sri Lanka and I began a tradition of going back each year, trying to forge my own adult relationship with the place, with my own friends and nights out and food experiences and opinions. And I began developing these recipes. I’ve translated my grandmother’s fastidious recipes from blurry iPhone scans of scribbled recipes in old exercise books. I have had instructions shouted down the phone by Mum from Sri Lanka, and I have been taught all over the island in the kitchens of friends of friends and aunties of aunties.

Cooking Sri Lankan food has become a way for me to create a sense of home in London, and to introduce the people I love to the food I love. Rambutan isn’t meant to be a comprehensive guide to every Sri Lankan dish out there, but is intended to be a mix of some of my reinventions and some treasured traditional dishes; part memoir, part manual, part travel guide. I hope that, as you cook the recipes yourself, you can step into my idea of Sri Lanka, one you can explore with the same wonder and excitement that I’ve had all my life.

Get the recipe for coconut dal with kale here.