As a child, some family friends who had emigrated to the UK from Ceylon (as it was then) cooked Sri Lankan food for us when we visited them, as my mum cooked the food of her region of North India, when friends visited us.
It was while attending a literary festival in Sri Lanka that Kuruvita learned about the dearth of recipe books for traditional Sri Lankan curries, and inspired to fill the gap, he began to revisit Sri Lanka more regularly, travelling around the country to research authentic recipes.
More than a collection of recipes, the book is also a treasure trove of evocative food and travel images, Kuruvita’s cherished childhood memories and cultural insights into the food, culture and people of Sri Lanka.
At the end of is a lengthy essay on cooking rice; much of it dedicated to personal memories of his childhood task of picking through the rice for errant stones, the way that husks are sometimes removed by setting sacks of rice upon the road for cars and trucks to drive over (thus loosening the husks, which can then be thrown into the air to winnow), and the rice farm land gifted to his father by a former Prime Minister of Sri Lanka.