Rice and Curry Is Fifteen Dishes, Not One

Ask for rice and curry in Sri Lanka and what arrives is not a curry with rice. It is a plate of rice surrounded by anywhere between five and fifteen separate preparations, each cooked differently, and intended to be combined by the eater in varying proportions with every mouthful.

It is closer in spirit to a Korean banchan table than to anything in an Indian restaurant, and it is the reason Sri Lankan food deserves far more attention than it gets.

There will be a main protein, often fish or chicken, in a dark roasted-spice gravy. There will be a dhal, almost always tempered with curry leaf, mustard seed and dried chilli. There will be two or three vegetable preparations, and at least one mallum, which is shredded green leaf stir-fried with coconut.

There will be a sambol, most often pol sambol: grated coconut pounded with chilli, lime, Maldive fish and salt. And there will be a papadam, which exists to add texture rather than flavour.

The single technical thing worth knowing is that Sri Lankan curry powder comes in two forms. Unroasted, used for white and vegetable curries, is pale and fragrant. Roasted, used for meat and fish, is nearly black and gives the deep, smoky, slightly bitter depth that distinguishes Sri Lankan food from its neighbours.

With your right hand, mixing a small area of rice with one or two curries at a time rather than combining everything at once. The point is that no two mouthfuls are the same.

Cutlery will always be offered and using it offends nobody. But you will taste more with your fingers, for reasons of temperature as much as anything.

Hotel buffets flatten the whole thing into mildness. The best rice and curry any of our guests eat is almost always in a home kitchen, which is why we build a cooking morning into most itineraries.