Taking you to Sri Lanka in every bite

Peter Kuruvita’s new Sri Lankan cook book, is a delectable combination of recipes, memoir and travelogue.

Serendip, a former name for Sri Lanka, was coined by Horace Walpole from the fairytale, The Three Princes of Serendip. The heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of,” he said of the tale.

Chef Peter Kuruvita’s first cookbook of traditional Sri Lankan food is also titled Serendip, My Sri Lankan Kitchen—and it is quite a book of discovery as well. “I feel that my brothers and I are these three princes and our discoveries and life experiences emulate the one which Horace Walpole wrote of,” says Kuruvita.

Kuruvita, an acclaimed chef at the Flying Fish restaurant in Sydney, was born in London to an Austrian mother and Sri Lankan father. After his first visit to Sri Lanka (a hilarious he recollects with the vivid recollections of a 4 and half year old in the book) he spent his childhood in Sri Lanka acquiring idyllic memories of family, fun and happy hours spent in the kitchen with his grandmother.

“My grandmother and I shared a very strong bond, not much was said but there was plenty of great quality time. The kitchen was the epicentre of our universe, every thing happened there and I was the honoured guest sitting wide eyed taking it all in,” he says.

His teenage years in Australia led to career as a chef that has taken him from Sydney to prestigious restaurants in London, the USA, Fiji, Lord Howe and Hayman Islands, Bali and back to Sydney. You can sample the fish curry from his book at the restaurant, and one of their biggest selling products is the brinjal pickle, also in the book.

Kuruvita travelled to various regions of the island nation in 2007-08, with his brother Phillip to source the recipes in this book. Yet, it was the treasure trove of his own grandmother’s kitchen in his ancestral home, in Dehiwala.

Kuruvita calls Serendip a book of “memories and recipes” and his writing really does evoke a sense of the strong family and kinship bonds he shared, while growing up in the ancestral home that he shared with 5 other children, his parents, two sets of uncles and aunties and his grand parents.

Equally evocative are the wonderful photographs—by his brother, Phillip and acclaimed photographer Alan Benson—of the people, the markets, the rice fields and of course the kitchens of Sri Lanka.

During his last visit, Kuruvita organised a major cook-off with the ladies of the Kuruvita dish and recollects how they all argued about every dish, just like the old time. “One of the beautiful things about all Sri Lankans and their food is that they can rarely agree on the details of any recipe,” he says. “Most are handed down through generations and each had its own very special preparation method and flavour. I hope that I have captured these recipes from my family’s kitchen, and I also hope to encourage other Sri Lankans living far from their ancestral homes to get back into their kitchens and share this rich and diverse culinary tradition with their families and friends.”

Offering Sri Lankan curries, traditional snacks, breads, sticky sweet treats, and recipes for curry powders, chutneys, sambas, pickles, even just browsing the book is a salivating experience. “These are from the taste buds of my Grandmother, aunties and father, they are flavours that will take any Sri Lanka home with one bite,” says Kuruvita.

For me personally, the best part of the book was the focus on the vegetarian curries—there is a fantastic range of them, considering Kuruvita’s grandmother was a vegetarian.

These vegetarian recipes use quite easily available ingredients, but in rather unconventional ways. I am quite tired of my own Gujarati recipe of bhindi masala, but Kuruvita’s ladies finger curry sounds easy enough to try one of these days.

Other recipes include a beetroot curry, cucumber curry, snake bean curry and even a pineapple curry. Kuruvita has his own favourites: “I have fond memories of my father in the Jardi, my grand mother in the breadfruit curry and my aunties in the beetroot and ladies fingers. My own are the combined flavours of a lunch packet, Ambul Thiyal, Dahl and Samba rice.”

The chutneys and powders that Kuruvita includes are also quite simple, and most ingredients will come from your Indian spice, masala dabba, but with a Sri Lankan twist.

Though Sri Lankan fare might sound similar to Indian—rather South Indian food we are quite familiar with, Kuruvita points of the difference. “South Indian food is a very big part of Sri Lankan cookery—where ever you go you can get snacks and more filling foods that are South Indian. This cuisine is more about a combination of 15-20 different spices, without the use of Garam Masala or Asafoetida,” he says.

The book however, is as much about food, as it is about travel, culture and family—and the process of writing it seems to have touched Kuruvita quite fundamentally. He says of his last visit, “Sri Lanka was on the brink of the mess it is in now when we left. It could have been the new Singapore, there was harmony and peace and all people got on. Times change and rather than looking back I would like to look forward and hope that the harmonious place that was the old Sri Lanka will return with equality between all the inhabitants of the Jewel of the Indian Ocean.”