C.F. Gordon Cumming

Two Happy Years in Ceylon

As you will see from my recipes, I like to give you the quantities of spices for each recipe and encourage you to grind them fresh. Each dish has its particular blend of spices so just using a standard preparation will not get you the flavour you want in the dish.

That being said, there are two standard blends you can make in quantity and store.

Roasted spice mix

This is what I use for meat curries.

100 g coriander seed

50 g cumin seed

50 g fennel seed

Put your spices into a frying pan without oil on a high heat. You need to shake the pan from time to time to allow all of the spice to be roasted. What’s happening when you do this is a Maillard reaction, similar to what’s commonly called caramelising except it is more complex than that, resulting in the creation of new flavour compounds from the source material.

Roast them until the they begin to turn brown and release their scents. Keep shaking the pan as you roast so that the spices don’t burn.

How dark you roast them from here depends on what you are using them for. Some cooks and recipes call for roasting only until the aromas are released, which is fine for meats that need less spicing to complement the depth of their flavour.

When I use roasted spices, the gamier the meat – goat, venison, rabbit – the darker I roast the spices. Chicken also needs roasted spices, being at the bland end of the meat spectrum

When they a roasted to your taste, take the frypan off the fire. The spices will keep roasting in the heat from the pan so you may need to give another shake or two.

When the spice mix has cooled down grind it fine.

Store in a jar with a good seal or a ziplock plastic bag. You can store this in a cupboard – you don’t need to put it in the fridge. It will keep for months.

Unroasted spice mix

This is what I use for meat curries.

100 g coriander seed

50 g cumin seed

50 g fennel seed

1 tsp fenugreek seed

Grind together very fine.

Store in a jar with a good seal or a ziplock plastic bag. You can store this in a cupboard – you don’t need to put it in the fridge. This also will keep for months.

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What to use to grind the spices? Well, if I have a small amount I will use a mortar and pestle but I am generally more likely to use a dedicated spice grinder – either a coffee grinder reserved for this, or a specialist spice grinder from a South Asian supplier. To be honest, I haven’t developed the knack of not having spice seeds fly everywhere when I attack them in a mortar no matter how deep it is. When grinding roasted spices it’s best to let them cool down before grinding.

Some Sri Lankan recipes that use vinegar will ask you to grind the spices with the vinegar into a paste. Mustard is often ground this way. Use the vinegar sparingly if doing this in an electric grinder or you and your kitchen are likely to end up like a Jackson Pollock paint dribbled canvas.

How fine to grind the spice?  Generally I go for very finely ground and in specialist grinders that can be very fine indeed, certainly finer than in a mortar and pestle or on a grind stone. Sometimes, though I quite like having a medium to fine grind so some of the spice is in tiny tiny flakes that give texture and interest to the dish when my guest bites down on a sliver of a particular spice. There are also times I like going for a mix of a small amount of the whole spices as well as a fine grind.

If, like me, you grind more than you need, you can store the mix in a jar with a good seal (or one of those zoosh vacuum sealing plastic bag thingies),  but use it soonish (weeks to a couple of months) post the grinding. I find a roasted ground mix will last longer than an unroasted one.

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Why roast spices at all? Spices are comprised of two main oils. The first is a variety of volatile, or essential, oils, which give the spice its aroma. The other is a series of oleoresins, or non-volatile oils, which are responsible for the flavor. Roasting releases both enhancing flavour and aroma. Not all spices are roasted. Most commonly roasted are coriander, cumin and fennel. Dry red chillies are sometimes roasted along with the spices. 

Always dry roast your spices, if for no other reason than when you come to grind them the dryness helps break them down to a finer powder quicker. Put your spices into a frying pan without oil on a high heat. You need to shake the pan from time to time to allow all of the spice to be roasted. What’s happening when you do this is a Maillard reaction, similar to what’s commonly called caramelising except it is more complex than that, resulting in the creation of new flavour compounds from the source material.

How dark you roast them depends on what you are using them for. Some cooks and recipes call for roasting only until the aromas are released, which is fine for meats that need less spicing to complement the depth of their flavour.When I use roasted spices, the gamier the meat – goat, venison, rabbit – the darker I roast the spices. My mother also liked her chicken curry ‘black’, so I roast the spices till they are just off being burned. I think of it as if I was choosing a wine to go with game meat; it’s bound to have more depth, more robustness to its flavour to match that of the meat. Mustard seeds are sometimes roasted but treat them carefully, roasting just until they start to pop otherwise they become very bitter.

I know of at least one chef in Sydney who liked to walk around her dining space with a pan of roasting, aromatic spices before opening up for the night to get the diners flavour sensors alert and tantalised for what is to follow. My neighbours frequently tell me how wonderful the street smells as the stove ventilator wafts aromas over the fences as I roast – though that may well be because they are angling for a dinner invitation.

A cautionary note on roasting chilies – they can release quite pungent oils that leave the cook gasping and sneezing unattractively.

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Prior to the establishment of Dutch territories in coastal Sri Lanka under the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the main centre of cardamom production was in and around Kandy. The Dutch sought to break this monopolising of the trade by the Kandyan kings by encouraging the development of cardamom as a garden crop in its other territories – Malabar and Indonesia in particular. They did the same with pepper and coffee. In the second half of the 18th century, with its trade in these two territories slackening, the VOC tried to stimulate growing cinnamon in its Sri Lankan coastal territory only to be threatened with a rebellion that led to the scaling back of this push on coffee, pepper and cardamom and a return to focusing on cinnamon production, or rather exploitation under the policies they pursued here. De Silva (2005) argues that what production there was in the Dutch littoral territories provided good cash incomes to the Sinhalese, and through accelerating the monetization of the economy gave the Sinhalese an advantage in exploiting later opportunities in the plantation agriculture that was central to 19th century British rule.

Called enasal in Sinhala, the crushed seeds are the keynote flavour and perfume in wattalappam, the steamed coconut milk and jaggery pudding that stands in the same relationship to Sri Lankan cuisine as, say the pavlova does to Australian, or apple pie to Americans. It’s also used to perfume and flavour yellow (turmeric) rice or on celebratory occasions (along with cinnamon, cloves and curry leaves), and in pilau and biriyani, combination dishes of rice and meat.

Cardamom is considered a digestive in ayurvedic practice, used to cure flatulence and minor stomach complaints.

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Combined with grated coconut it also forms a thick exudation that is rolled in a pancake, or can be combined with stringhoppers, and again wth coconut milk makes the evil looking paradisical sweet kalu dodol.

When I was young it used to come in a large ball, made by setting it in two half coconut shells so you get two halves that are then wrapped in a large dry leaf and tied securely with thin strips of coconut leaf – a common form of binding. You can still get it as a leaf wrapped ball but it’s more often now just the two halves bagged in plastic, or a log of it also in plastic. In Sri Lanka in 2006 I bought some in a shiny vacuum pack.

The colour and the intensity of the flavour varies on the sugar and the heat applied in its making. The darker jaggery made from kittul is superior.

I bought some gur the next day, in Gaya, the bustling smelly inland city from which you head off the Bodhgaya, the village where Buddha meditated and achieved enlightenment. It was wrapped in a piece of paper, and I carried it around as we wandered through town till I found a red bull and fed it the gur. The bull seemed to enjoy it, as did everyone watching. I’m not sure my immediate fortune changed, but no doubt it helped me become a better person, humbler anyway.

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Is there any flavouring less attractive to the eye than goraka? Selkirk’s description draws a discreet veil over what it looks like when you buy it. Well, here goes; catch a slug, put it in the sun till it is dessicated, deep browny black, wrinkled, leathery, squishy to touch, with a slightly putrid smell. Nice, eh! And yet, it’s one of those ingredients that is utterly transformed and transforming when added to a dish.

What is it? It’s the dried segments of the fruit of Garcinia gummi-gutta – a.k.a.gamboge – and it’s used as a souring agent in Sri Lanka and Southern Indian curries, particularly pork and fish curries. You have to soak it before adding it to curries, either whole or ground. It’s the main flavouring in the classic southern Sri Lankan dish ambul thiyal.

Happily, you can also now buy it as a paste in a jar in Sri Lankan providores, easier to use, less repulsive to have lying around your kitchen.  

If you like fish but can’t stand the smell of it raw, washing the fish in water in which goraka has been soaking hides the smell of it.

If you use it whole, best to tell your guests not to chomp into it along with the fish or pork.

And yes, it is from the resin of the Garcinia species that the yellow pigment called gamboge comes.

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Native to South and South East Asia it grows into a beautiful fragrant tree though it’s capacity for sending out suckers has given it a bad reputation in some Western municipalities as an invasive weed. Wijesinghe has a lovely vignette about it in Monsoons and Potholes:  ‘When it rustled a bit too much in the monsoon wind the dog would bark all night long. The dog would be removed from the kennel and tied onto the Karapincha tree. He would then stop barking and then piss on the tree all night long.’

Some older Indian cookbooks suggest using bay leaves instead of curry leaves – don’t; bay leaves have nothing of the flavour of karapincha. There is also a silver frondy leafed plant sold in nurseries as a ‘curry plant’ which also has nothing of the flavour and is in no way a substitute.

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