Twilight Reminiscences 24 – The Foods of Christmas past-by Sanjiva Wijesinha
Source:Sanjivawijesinha
With Christmas just a few days away, I have been reminiscing about Christmases past.
Now that I am older in years than our current president (although I am pleased to say that I am younger than all five living past presidents!) my memory is not as sharp as it used to be and the details of the many Christmases I’ve enjoyed over the years tend to blur into each other. However, the one constant feature in all these reminiscences is the memory of the different foods we used to enjoy at Christmas time during our Colombo childhood.
We Sri Lankans live on a small island where according to the census Christians make up less than seven per cent of our population. That said, virtually all of us have Christian friends, many of us have Christian neighbours and a lucky few even have Christian relatives. So for all of us the last week of December becomes a time of celebration. Even during times of austerity – and we have certainly had our unfair share of such times in the past several years – many of us would get together with Christian friends to ‘break bread’ and share the goodwill and good cheer of this time of celebration.
The foods that are typical of a Sri Lankan Christmas interestingly reflect our colonial history. From the point of view of our culinary heritage at least, we in this country have been fortunate with the many influences that arrived via the travellers, traders and colonial trespassers who came here. From these has evolved a variety of foods that today we proudly call our own. These delicacies represent a fusion of Asian and European flavours that makes use of locally grown ingredients, adapting foreign recipes to suit local tastes and local resources. For example, in a tropical island where apples and pears were not readily obtainable, pineapple or preserved ash pumpkin was substituted in the recipe for Love Cake – while cadjunuts that grow abundantly here replaced almonds for making Baklava.
And we, growing up in Colombo in the latter half of the 20th century, were gastronomically privileged to enjoy the foods bequeathed to us by centuries of foreign visitors. While historians and sociologists may debate the pros and cons of European colonisation – the benefits that accrued versus the suffering our people endured – all that interested us as young ones was the various delicacies, we were able to enjoy at Christmas time.
Three classic examples of these with which we are so familiar today are Sri Lankan Love Cake (which came to us as the Portuguese Bolo d’Amor), Sri Lankan Breudher (believed to have been introduced by the Dutch) and Sri Lankan Christmas Cake (which comes from the time of the British).
Love cake, first introduced here during the 16th century when the Portuguese controlled the coastal areas of the island, has evolved into a confectionery unique to Sri Lanka. Combining semolina or rulang (which is a common ingredient in Portuguese cooking) with rosewater, almond essence and crushed cadjunuts together with spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon and cardamom, today’s Love Cake with a crisp, flaky crust and soft, moist fudge-like inside is truly a marriage of East and West. I have to admit (with a modest touch of pride) that the Love Cake made by my mother was hard to beat!
Why was it called Bolo d’Amor (meaning ‘Cake of Love’) by the Portuguese – which name came down to us as Love Cake? Some say that preparing such a cake took so much effort that it was truly a labour of love – you would only make it for someone you loved very much! Others maintain that Love Cake was so called because it was made by young ladies to win the hearts of their suitors. Who knows?!
Breudher is probably the best known of the cakes introduced during Dutch times (1658 to 1796). Search the internet these days with the single word ‘Breudher’ and almost all the hits brought up by your search engine are descriptions of ‘Sri Lankan Breudher’! Go to Holland and search for a place serving Breudher and you would probably draw a blank.
Even the name Breudher is hard to pin down. It is likely of Dutch origin – either from ‘brood’ meaning bread or ‘broeder’ meaning brother. This is plausible, because wherever the Dutch settled down in the lands around the Indian Ocean such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Kerala we find bready cakes of Dutch origin bearing similar names – bolu bluder, roti bluder, bluder and bruder.
Sri Lankan Breudher of course is much richer than these poor Asian relations. A classical Breudher (like those made by our neighbour Mrs Herft) required three pounds (we measured in pounds those days, not kilograms!) of wheaten dough to which were added a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, ¼ lb. of raisins – and no less than 30 eggs!
Finally, there is Sri Lankan Christmas cake, introduced here by the British but now made our very own. It is rich, dark and moist, loaded with dried fruit like sultanas, raisins, glace cherries, preserved ginger and chow-chow plus fragrant spices like cardamoms, cinnamon and nutmeg. Instead of using refined flour as the British do, we use semolina – which gives the cake a uniquely rich texture quite unlike a dry English fruit cake.
Reminiscing about my mother’s Love Cake, Mrs Herft’s Breudher and Aunty Lakshmi’s Christmas cake makes me yearn for those days (and those foods) of childhood.
As we all look forward to a new year of hope, may you all have a Christmas of Happiness where you share goodwill (and food) with your friends and neighbours.
Sanjiva Wijesinha is the author of Tales From my Island – see
https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Island-Stories-Friendship-Childhood-ebook/dp/B00R3TS1QQ/
