Food, Society and the Polos Ambula

by ACB Pethiyagoda

Anna Trapido, anthropologist and chef, author of ‘Hunger and Freedom: The story of Nelson Mandela’ calls the book a `gastro political biography weaving in the stories of men and women who struggled for freedom alongside Mandela’. She states further ‘you can always understand the society that produced the food by looking at the food’.

True, the eating habits of people are greatly influenced by history, geography, religious beliefs, foreign invasions, level of prosperity etc. of any society. Even the presentation of food as a meal and how it is taken to the mouth is influenced by one or more of the above factors among other considerations.

From time immemorial the high born have had their food in special dining areas off expensive metal or delicate porcelain placed on decorated tables and helped by lesser mortals waiting on them while the less privileged ate where the food was cooked off rough earthen vessels, large leaves etc. Europeans eat with the aid of forks, spoons and knives as their food consisting of flesh of various animals and birds, vegetables and breads need to be cut and sliced for the pieces to be picked up.

We and the Indians who eat rice and curry, use the fingers of the right hand mostly, to mix the curries with the grainy rice and form portions of convenient sizes to be placed in the mouth. Larger numbers of Asians whose staple food is also rice use chopsticks to pick up pieces of each accompaniment, very often from common dishes, and follow these with small lumps of glutinous rice, which make easier handling than grainy rice, from bowls brought close to the mouth.

The use of chopsticks, especially those of disposable bamboo, are not only hygienic and convenient but delicate and elegant allowing the small portions to the chewed at a leisurely pace and uninterrupted conversation if in company or even silent contemplation. Eating with the fingers is no less elegant as long as whole lengths of fingers are not used and the palm as well to slurp the residual slurry of grain and gravy!

Although our food habits have been influenced to some extent by Arabs, Moors, Portuguese, Dutch, Indians and the English, the basic rice and curry meal in an average Sinhalese home today does not appear to have changed very much from what we know was eaten by the early Sinhalese. The outside influence is mostly in the way of sweet meats, festive season fare of the different ethnic groups, eaten between normal rice meals or on special occasions when rice gives way to other substitutes like English and North Indian food.

The cuisine of the English starts and ends with shepherd’s pie, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and bland deserts while North Indian fare consists of a wide range of delectable dishes. Except for a few of our highly westernized folk who took to English food habits, the people of the Hill Country who were the last to come under foreign influence continued with rice and curry consisting mostly of a variety of vegetables with little or no meat as the majority of the population was Buddhist.

The style of cooking fish, mutton and chicken in Jaffna is inimitable barring Hotel Renuka in Kollupitiya and possibly some seedy joints in Hospital Street and Pettah. In the Southern coastal areas fish is cooked in dozens of ways but in an average middle class home in the rest of the county a rice meal consists of one or two vegetables, meat or dried or fresh fish and the oft derided Mysore dhal, all cooked in coconut milk, and sometimes as an after thought Pol Sambol or Papadam. These are quite ordinary as regards taste or method of preparation. But five or six decades ago in a well to do rural household in the Upcountry a typical lunch or dinner consisted of brown country rice with five or six curries of vegetable (grown with organic fertilizers only) from the home garden and without fail jak cooked in one of various ways or bread fruit in season with any yams such as batala, rata ala, innala etc. and never manioc for some unknown reason. Jak and breadfruit in excess of daily needs in season were cut to convenient sizes and sun dried for off season use.

Meat, if at all mutton (never beef, pork or chicken before the advent of broilers) and fish were not eaten daily due to their unavailability outside towns but dried seer fish or sprats fried with big onions dusted with powdered dried red chillies was common. The mallung consisted of one such as tampala,

mukunuwenna, sarana, alakola, miyanakola and unlike now kang kung was not popular. Angunakola mallung with a slightly bitter taste, accompanied by raw red onions was a treat to those with a cultivated taste for it.

Uncooked vegetables were rare except for gotukola sambal with lots of scraped coconut, sliced red onions and plenty of Maldive fish. Sliced raw cucumber in coconut milk with rings of big onions, green chillies and Maldive fish was served only for lunch and like the mallungs never for dinner as these were considered difficult to digest in the few hours before sleep and if ignored bad dreams would be the result!

From this it will be seen that people in the rural areas, even those not so well off, could eat a well balanced variety of food all produced locally and therefore at an easily afforded cost.

Now and then friends from the maritime provinces have said in jest the Kandyan’s contribution to society was only that particular dance form.

They conveniently forgot that throughout the last century and perhaps in the future as well the major forex earnings for the entire country’s benefit came from the tea plantations in this area. Be that as it may in equal fun these friends were reminded of the caviar from the outlying areas of Kandy — the polos ambula!

My sisters have often related that making the curry in grandmother’s exclusive domain, the kitchen, with rows of dara lipas of varying sizes was a sort of ‘special operation’, with two or three women tasked to carry out each step of the process as directed particularly when guests were expected, an almsgiving or some such occasion was due in the next day or two.

Several partly matured jak fruits only from selected trees and of the exact degree of desired maturity were said to have been peeled, cut into about 20 pieces a fruit, washed and ‘drowned’ in coconut milk in a huge earthen pot used only to make this curry. Various condiments dried and ground on the many decades old mirisgala were added and cooked over a slow wood fire for about three or four hours until the curry was ready to simmer over a paddy husk fire when a few handfuls of one to two inch long slices of coconut kernel were said to have been added. The curry had no free flowing gravy, neither was it an entirely dry curry.

The cooked pieces were a rare pink in colour, breaking easily at the touch with the subtle flavours of a mixture of all the spices, none predominating another, from a Kandyan forest garden, a truly Sinhala dish turned out by those with years of experience and with the correct touch.

Even the few who have some idea of this process will now, due to circumstances, use a pressure cooker or a stainless steel vessel over an electric or gas fire with the result, sadly nowhere near the real McCoy.

(From the memoirs of the writer first published in the Sunday Island in 2008)