In Sri Lanka, rice is greater than a sustaining staple. It's an simple essential character in its historical past and identification.
My mom is an effective cook dinner.
My father is simply barely higher. That’s how my youthful sister would all the time describe my dad and mom’ meals. She’s proper. My mom cooked scrumptious curries. However my father cooked the meals we maintain pricey.
My father grew up in Nabiriththawewa, a small village in Kurunegala, about 120km (75 miles) from Colombo.
Not like his two older brothers who had been extra concerned about going out with their mates, my father accompanied my grandfather to each village wedding ceremony. From what I might collect, my grandfather was the chef at each perform within the village. He had cooked to feed a whole lot.
“I adopted him like a thread follows the needle. That’s how I realized to cook dinner,” my father would say.
Though I want I had met him, I by no means noticed my grandfather, he was already a distant reminiscence after I got here to this world.
After I was eight years outdated, my household lived in a small home by the rice fields in my father’s village. My father labored a tedious workplace job, commuting for hours on a passenger practice daily.
However when he was dwelling, he would spend time doing two issues: gardening and cooking.
My father lived a frugal life so he might construct a safe future for his two daughters.
He was additionally a frugal cook dinner, making use of each ingredient so nothing in his kitchen ended up within the waste pit. He mastered the artwork of scrumptious snacks, like bathtub aggala, a Sri Lankan candy he makes utilizing coconut and leftover rice and that marked our teatime ritual rising up. In Sinhala, aggala are candy ball-shaped snacks and bathtub is cooked rice.
At dwelling, teatime was after I cycled dwelling by means of the rice paddies from the neighbours’ to search out my little sister nonetheless in her vivid sequined nursery gown along with her colouring books. Exterior, children could be flying kites as males labored within the fields and ladies in vibrant headwraps reaped golden-yellow paddy with their sharp sickles.
My mom, who was a authorities college instructor, could be simply getting up from her afternoon nap to make tea with powdered milk for us.
Throughout the week, teatime meant a cup of tea with a packet of biscuits or a loaf of white bread to dip. However on the weekends, it was my father’s bathtub aggala, eaten as we sat on the verandah watching the world. Typically, my dad and mom would inform us about their childhood. Or we'd simply watch colonies of bats dart throughout the night sky as evening fell, and giggle over one thing my little sister stated.
As I look again on these teatimes spent at dwelling, I miss the sounds and colors of these evenings that held us collectively, and the style of my father’s bathtub aggala.
It is just now that I perceive that, for my father, bathtub aggala was greater than candy rice balls he made for his household. For him, it was benefiting from rice: a grain beloved to him and all Sri Lankans.
The beloved grain
“Udetath bathtub, dawaltath bathtub, retath bathtub” is a well-liked Sinhala saying meaning “Rice for the morning, afternoon, and evening.”
Nothing displays the essence of my island and folks higher than that. Rice isn't solely the primary staple for Sri Lankans, it’s greater than that.
In island kitchens, rice boils daily in clay pots over firewood or steams in electrical rice cookers. A pot of steamed rice dominates our tables usually, paired with different dishes and condiments. When rice isn't cooked this manner for breakfast or dinner, one other rice-based meals blesses our empty plates.
It might be kiribath, a sticky mix of rice and coconut milk eaten for breakfast. Or rice flour is used to make idi appa or idiyappam, discs of steamed skinny noodles. Or appa or appam, bowl-shaped snacks with crispy edges and fluffy centres. Or dosa, skinny, crisp flatbreads made with a fermented rice-lentil combine. Or levariya, sweet-savoury pockets of rice noodles stuffed with caramelised coconut.
We use soaked, floor rice to organize sweetmeats for our New Yr each April and when friends come over, we cook dinner rice with aromatics like curry leaves and cinnamon and garnish it with crunchy cashews to organize golden kaha bathtub.
When meals is scarce, households soak leftover rice to eat within the morning with kiri hodi, a turmeric-infused coconut gravy soured with lime. This modest meal was my father’s favorite breakfast, paired with contemporary inexperienced chilli.
Rice feeds us, builds us, and shapes us in some ways. This humble grain that thrives within the mud holds a spot in each Sri Lankan meal and has crept into each nook and cranny of our society.
Rice has a big share of the island’s agriculture, frames its financial system, and unpacks our historical past. And our love for it has given beginning to a number of flavourful dishes.
I realized how rice grew after we moved to our father’s village. Paddy – the phrase for the plant and the grain earlier than eradicating the hull – flourished within the fields because of the farmers toiling within the solar.
My father grew paddy in a small area inherited from his dad and mom, which grew sufficient rice for us. Whereas he readied the sphere, I might run behind him, getting my toes muddy. A couple of times, I helped him plant seedlings.
The earliest stone carving of paddy cultivation in Sri Lanka dates again to 939-940 AD, says Professor Buddhi Marambe, who specialises in weed science and meals safety. Historic Sri Lankan rulers constructed reservoirs to harness rainwater whereas folks developed and preserved rice varieties for greater than 3,000 years.
However when the island was colonised by the British in 1815, money crops like tea and rubber had been imposed on farmers to earn a living for the colonisers. British propaganda campaigns additionally inspired folks to exchange rice with wheat of their eating regimen. “By the Forties, Sri Lanka needed to import 60 p.c of the rice wanted for the nation’s meagre six million inhabitants,” says Marambe.
Within the following many years, refined wheat flour and white bread rose in reputation whereas native rice was changed by high-yield varieties to maintain the rising inhabitants – varieties that wanted chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
In 2020, there was sufficient domestically produced rice to feed Sri Lanka’s inhabitants of 21 million, Marambe says. However the then-government abruptly banned artificial fertilisers in April 2021, forcing farmers to show to natural fertilisers they weren't used to. Farmers misplaced their harvest, and lots of abandoned their rice fields.
By the point the ban was lifted in November final 12 months, Sri Lanka didn't have sufficient international foreign money to import chemical fertilisers and pesticides. The laborious foreign money scarcity additionally resulted in a gasoline disaster, and farmers need to pay extra now for reaping and threshing machines.
“Most individuals [in our village] are abandoning their fields now,” my mom stated after I rang her just lately. “The machine is charging 240 rupees [$0.66] per minute. They will’t afford it.”
Sri Lanka’s future rice manufacturing now depends upon a crippled financial system and tentative international loans that will or could not come.
Prior to now, leftover rice was thought of “poor man’s meals”, so folks stopped consuming meals like diya bathtub (fermented rice porridge with coconut milk) for breakfast, reaching for refined white bread slathered in preservative-laden bottled jam as a substitute.
However, in June, meals inflation was greater than 60 p.c in Sri Lanka and has since saved climbing. Costs soar every day, and most low-income households eat only one or two meals a day. As folks rethink their meals decisions, frugal cooking has made a comeback.
My dad and mom not purchase biscuits or white bread. A packet of biscuits that price 200 Sri Lankan rupees ($0.55) per week in the past is now 600 rupees ($1.65). “Who would pay that a lot for biscuits,” my mom stated. She desires me to deliver her some from India, the place I’m presently travelling.
My father makes bathtub aggala extra usually now. It’s a dish he realized to make by watching his dad and mom and older sisters, he instructed me just lately on the cellphone.
When my father was an adolescent, Sri Lanka was battling drought and an financial disaster within the Seventies. Although his household had land to develop rice, there wasn’t sufficient water. So my grandparents made probably the most of what was out there.
“They instructed us by no means to throw away rice, not even a single grain of it,” my father stated. “After I noticed slightly boy digging in a dustbin for meals at college, I realised what it means to have meals on the desk.”
Rice and coconuts
I don’t bear in mind us ever shopping for rice. Even after I left dwelling to reside in Colombo, my dad and mom would go to me with tightly packed grocery luggage of rice from my father’s fields. However just lately after I known as dwelling, my mom stated she might need to purchase rice for the primary time in her life.
“The [threshing] machine will solely come if we give them diesel,” my mom stated. “And we will’t get diesel.”
Many households within the village are actually consuming diya bathtub within the morning, my mom stated.
Making diya bathtub includes just a few steps in case you, like my father, wish to eat it scorching. Many individuals eat diya bathtub chilly, which is quicker.
If there's rice left over after dinner, my father soaks it in water, letting it soak in a single day and draining it the subsequent morning. Then he heats up the coconut milk in a pot, provides dried crimson chilli, curry leaves, onion, salt, half a teaspoon of turmeric powder, and Maldive fish flakes (dried, cured tuna fish), and lets it simmer.
For sourness, he squeezes in half a lime or provides just a few pods of darkish brown sun-dried tamarind. (This concoction alone is named kiri hodi). When it’s prepared, my father pours it, piping scorching, onto a bowl of rice and eats it with contemporary inexperienced chilli and, generally, fried dried fish.
Chilly diya bathtub is a no-cook meal: combine two cups of coconut milk with one cup of soaked rice. Then add thinly-sliced crimson onion, two tablespoons of lime juice, three-four roasted dried crimson chillies, one teaspoon of grated Maldive fish, and salt to style. For those who prefer it sourer, squeeze in some extra lime juice.
Some folks like contemporary inexperienced chilli as a substitute of dried crimson chilli. Maldive fish is non-obligatory, but it surely provides a pleasant umami punch. Many elders imagine that diya bathtub, with its fermented rice and coconut milk, cools the physique and prevents heartburn.
Talking of coconut milk, after I make diya bathtub, I attain for coconut milk that is available in sealed cardboard containers however my dad and mom have by no means purchased coconut milk of their life, they make it. My father plucks coconuts from our backyard, removes the fibrous outer husk, halves the nut, and scrapes it with a hiramanaya – a standard grater with a picket seat for the individual to sit down whereas grating. He mixes the grated coconut with water, squeezing it a number of occasions along with his arms to make coconut milk.
Making coconut milk is laborious, however my dad and mom nonetheless do it. If rice is our staple, coconut is its mate. It thickens our curries, binds our sambals, flavours our meals, and balances meals with wholesome fat. Coconuts additionally make our condiments richer to pair with humble rice.
Greater than aggala
Whereas folks often boil contemporary rice for aggala, my father soaks leftover rice to make sugary, coconutty balls with a slight crunch. For him, bathtub aggala is meals safety. It's minimising waste.
To make this teatime snack, he ferments leftover cooked rice in a single day in water. Within the morning, he drains and sun-dries the rice till it's crisp, then roasts it for about 20 minutes in a skillet on a low flame, till it turns brown.
After I made bathtub aggala just lately, I roasted the rice for 5 to eight minutes and switched off the range earlier than it modified color, so it stayed white. Do as you want, roasting for longer offers aggala a golden-brown color and nutty flavour.
Utilizing a pestle and mortar, my father grinds the nice and cozy, roasted rice till he will get an uneven texture with items of damaged rice that add a pleasant crunch. You should utilize an electrical grinder as I do, simply don’t grind it into powder.
Take 250g of this floor rice and add about 100g of grated coconut, half a cup of sugar, half a teaspoon of salt, and half a cup of water. Combine it properly along with your arms and form it into little balls. Some folks favor a little bit of a spice kick to their aggala, which is well achieved by sprinkling a touch of black pepper into the combo.
As soon as prepared, all the time serve with a cup of tea.
My father’s bathtub aggala is a sworn statement to Sri Lanka’s longstanding relationship with rice. It bears witness to the island’s usually troubled historical past and current, twisted and framed by politics and financial pursuits.
The highway to restoration is lengthy. However for now, I’d prefer to be lulled into candy teatimes at dwelling. One bathtub aggala at a time.
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