This appetising book is published by Mascot Books and printed, coincidently, here in Malaysia. The book’s informative and poignant illustrations are by Pamudu Tennakoon, and overall book design by Jeremy John Parker. Mary Anne Mohanraj’s ‘A Feast of Serendib’ is available through Amazon.
In this culinary/literary infusion, Mohanraj has laid out, cover to cover, some one hundred flavoursome recipes (over 270 plus pages) from an appetiser of Chili-Mango Cashews to a dessert of Tropical Fruit with Chili, Salt, and Lime. The recipes originated from recollections of her mother’s Sri Lankan superbly multifaceted cooking, collected more than a decade before. Mohanraj’s hard work, patience and diligence has paid off in the production of this elegantly designed, and most informative, volume of a rare cuisine.
The book’s title ‘Serendib’ is where the word serendipity derives. In Arabic/Persian, ‘Serendib’ means the Island of Rubies - that stunning isle which we now call Sri Lanka, or Lanka - the famous isle of the Hindu Ramayana (Sita and Rama’s love story). For others that punctuation of Indian sub-continent is Ceylon, wafting memories of tea.
My personal attachment to the island of Sri Lanka had began in 2004. I carried a broken heart to heal from India’s Chennai to the majestically spiritual island of Sri Lanka. Previously I had foolishly engaged in a short lived romance with a Keralan Singaporean (no Sita/Rama story), which had sadly gone sour. On the way back to England I took the opportunity to heal my aching heart in Sri Lanka. I had looked forward to the distinct pleasure of spending a few days sheltering beneath wind cooled banana fronds on Sri Lanka’s west coast, near the capital, Colombo with a hankering for authentic ‘Hoppers’.
As I was on an ancient island known to be blessed with a most diverse of cuisines from Sinhalese and Tamil traditions; from the cuisines of Arabia, from the Portuguese, the Dutch, British etc., it seemed pertinent to discover more about the food that I had come to love back in the amiable homes of British friends of Sri Lankan descent.
Since the 1990s I had developed a taste for the aforementioned Sri Lankan ‘Hoppers’ (those delightfully thin fermented batter ‘pancakes’ with the soft spongy middle used for absorbing coconut milk and jaggery, called appams in Indian, page 203). Likewise, the sheer delight of the thin rice noodle ‘String Hoppers’ (Idiyappam, or rice flour dough steamed noodles, also called putu mayam in Malaysian) which had captured my gastronomic imagination. Incidentally, hoppers and string hoppers are excellent with curries, especially when eaten using your fingers for an authentic experience and an enhanced taste. I suggest that you follow the recipes lay betwixt the pages of ‘A Feast of Serendib’, and thereby discover for yourself. I might also imply that the simplicity of a Sri Lankan ‘Fish Curry’ (Meen Kari, mentioned on page 109) with hopper/string hopper or rice is similarly difficult to resist.
Mary Anne Mohanraj’s delicious book brings all those righteous tastes back to me. Mohanraj’s ‘A Feast of Serendib’ feeds my inner craving for Sri Lankan cuisine, and those items of Indian cuisine which have slipped into it, like ‘Chai’ (Indian tea) and ‘Falooda’ (which is somewhere between a drink and a dessert containing milk and sweet basil seeds and sometimes rose water and ice cream), and may just have an Iranian connection. Reading Mohanraj’s book, and gawping at the images and recipes makes me wish that I could just up sticks once more and travel back to that resplendent island, and again savour its distinctive fare.
Thank you Mary Anne Mohanraj, for the nostalgia.
No comments:
Post a Comment