Sri Lankan gastronomy is a guest book that has been signed by traders, travellers, explorers, exploiters and everyone in between. The entries run for centuries, if not for a millennia or two. Sri Lankan gastronomy is also the log book recording the many culinary adventures Sri Lankans have sailed into in their many ventures abroad. As friends and foes mingled in this strategic node in the ancient trade route, new dishes fused with the local tastes.

Over time, the foods that married into the local feast became signposts to the many twists in the long history of this Island. Yet, until recently these fusions that eventually became such an integral part of the local fare that its roots blurred and and then vanished, did not step out of the ancient holistic principles. Sri Lankan food thus remained as one of the healthiest world cuisines.

The contemporary history begins with the arrival of the colonial forces. The very factors that created this fantastic fare brought about this most adverse threat to the Island. The Island’s spices, renowned as the best in the world attracted these foes that corrupted a most ancient civilization, creating an inferior complex on its food among many other issues. Thus, today, Sri Lankan cuisine not only languishes on the backburner in the Asian gastronomy where as its Indian and Thai cousins are basking in the culinary limelight, but is also increasingly losing its principles.

It is not only the international influences that are affecting Sri Lankan cooking, but also the changing lifestyles of people. Sri Lankans as a nation have moved to many other spheres than agriculture and with that into the global rat race, leaving them less time and energy to cook proper Sri Lankan meals. As short cuts emerge, so have new diseases that are not only long term and often terminal, but also increasingly mutating into the new generations and thereby making these diseases hereditary.

This has emphasized the need to return the roots and to appreciate every aspect that makes Sri Lankan cuisine so unique. This uniqueness is apparent in the very cut of the vegetables, in the use of the various spices and herbs and the cooking techniques employed. Even the basic menu, which was once the vast spread of at least ten or more dishes, aims to bring a diversity to the meal. This vast spread is no longer affordable in the current times, but the diversity Sri Lankan fare aims at is still possible. This diversity not only strives to bring a different health benefit, but also an explosion of tastes and textures into one single mouthful.

Perhaps the most inhibiting factor to easily cooking Sri Lankan curries and other accompaniments is the design of the kitchen. Too often, the Sri Lankan kitchen is divided into two parts – the rough kitchen, which is allocated to the domestic help and the pantry, which is really a show piece of the house. Increasingly the pantry is been designed to be open to the living room. Aesthetically this is very appealing to prospective buyers for a pantry with new cupboards and granite tops is very beautiful. Practically, this is appalling.

Having two kitchens is only practical if there is steady domestic help, which most unfortunately is not the case in most modern households. Domestic help is proving to be increasingly fickle and the householders are more often than not stuck between the previous maid and the next, than the present. During these void moments, cooking becomes a nightmare with the tasks spreading into two kitchens. Cooking thus involves a lot of running to and fro between the two kitchens and the preparations turn into a marathon of sorts.

The so-called rough kitchen is really an outdated model. It worked well a generation or more ago: a time where cooking was a predominant task with many helping hands and the kitchen was no more than a soot hole. A time when organizing of tasks and time management was not uppermost in importance, but room for many to move about attending to various tasks was. Keeping with traditions, this so-called rough kitchen is an airless, dingy room that over time gets blackened with use. Over time debris of years collect and it is not a room that is pleasant to enter.

The rough kitchen is still useful when there is domestic help for most domestic help are quite notorious in handling kitchen appliances and keeping in general cleanliness. More often than not, most householders find themselves with more expenses than they bargained for with appliances breaking and disappearing at regular intervals. Thus, it does make sense to have an entirely separate kitchen – albeit an airier one with freedom for better organizing – for the use of the domestic help, but furnished with less expensive equipment.

However, the pantry should also be equipped to handle the same tasks as the rough kitchen, so that in the frequent intervals where domestic help is absent, the householders can still cook a meal without the marathon race between two kitchens, where one is trying desperately to achieve the tasks of two. This would call for the pantry to hold space for the basic appliances such as the coconut scraper, the grinding stone and the motor and pestle. Many pantries fail because most designs are borrowed from the west, which does not use these appliances.