MARKETS : Ceylon, It’s Been Good to Know You

Sri Lankan Delight, 7455 Reseda Blvd. Unit C, Reseda, (818) 774- 1237. Open Monday through Friday from noon to 9 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

On a Saturday afternoon at Sri Lankan Delight, customers have come in to stock up on shark curry and jars of pickled garlic cloves. They’re buying samba rice, a novel strain with grains the size of grape seeds. At the check-out counter of this unusual--and small--grocery store, people are sampling love cake, a rich confection dense with cashew nuts and deeply aromatic of honey and rose water. But it’s the “short eats,” or snacks, that display the influences that have shaped Sri Lanka’s cuisine.

Over the centuries, various European rulers left their imprint on Sri Lanka’s food. That’s why you can get a very British-style stuffed flaky pastry called bacon and egg roll, or a South Indian inspired gothamber-- stuffed flat bread rolled around a curried filling. The Chinese rolls are exactly like Dutch-Indonesian rissolles and the seeni sambol bun is filled with a peppery-hot onion relish that is a fixture on the Sri Lankan table.

The tropical island nation, formerly known as Ceylon, has a reputation for its surrounding clusters of coral reefs in translucent green waters edged with luminous stretches of golden beach. And indeed, at Sri Lankan Delight, there is an aquariums of tropical fish--the only design element in this spare mini-mall grocery shop.

Sri Lankan cuisine resembles that of its closest neighbor, India, 20 miles north across the Palk Strait. But Sri Lanka’s vividly hot curries, chutneys and side dishes called sambols (similar to, but spelled differently than the Indian sambal ) have a character that bridges South Indian and Southeast Asian kitchens. Cooks make use of the fragrant lemon grass, pandanus leaves, dried fish, coconut milk and tart flavorings such as tamarind found in Thai, Indonesian and Malaysian dishes.

Sri Lankan Delight somewhat haphazardly stocks an interesting balance of imported convenience products and exotic raw ingredients. How much is on hand varies from week to week as shipments from Sri Lanka tend to be a bit erratic, but at least, the selection allows inexperienced cooks to put together a Sri Lankan meal. When fully stocked, it also satisfies the fussiest expert who prefers cooking from scratch. There are ready-to-eat curries in cans, mixes for making Sri Lanka’s many flat breads and a collection of unusual herbs. Dozens of exotic pickles and chutneys, unavailable in most Indian stores, fill the shelves.

“We always used to buy our own specialty foods at Indian markets around here,” explains Bishan Seneviratne, the store’s co-owner, recounting how the business got started. But Sri Lankan curries and pickles are really quite different, and Seneviratne began to think about the feasibility of a store devoted strictly to Sri Lankan goods.

He had become familiar with Sri Lankan food exports when his parents migrated to Australia where such products are widely distributed. He did a little neighborly market research by talking to the editor of Sri Lankan Express, a local Sri Lankan newspaper and to the Sri Lankan monks at the Dharma Vijaya Buddhist Vihara (temple) on Crenshaw. Unofficially, Seneviratne concluded about 15,000 Sri Lankan families live close enough to Reseda to shop there.

With his wife, Dede, and two Sri Lankan friends, Christopher Perera and Roshan De Silva, Seneviratne rented what used to be an insurance office. They pulled up the old carpet and completely gutted the place. After work and on weekends they built the market’s shelves, counters and generous storage area. They also obtained Sri-1237 for the shop’s telephone number.

Unfortunately, they had barely been open a month when the Northridge earthquake demolished almost everything on the shelves and much of what they had in the warehouse. A water heater broke, flooding the store and they had to close for a month. But little by little they are bouncing back. A shipment from Canada has helped to tide them over and while their stocks are low at this point, they expect their own shipment of imports from Sri Lanka by the end of this month.

De Silva and Perera, friends since their childhood in Sri Lanka, met Seneviratne at work. In college Seneviratne had majored in marketing and Perera in computer science. Both men wanted to get involved in importing and exporting and it seems that’s about to happen. Now that the business is up and running, De Silva’s father in Sri Lanka has organized a shipment of foods for the shop that the partners will import directly.

Shopping List

CURRIES AND CURRY

PRODUCTS:

Blast-furnace hot to complex and mild, Sri Lanka’s many curries fall into one of three major styles:

White curries, based on coconut milk, usually have a dash of saffron and just a touch of other curry seasonings.

Red curries, made with lots of ground chile and a few spices, are the hottest.

Black curries, a complex array of spices, are roasted to a toasty brown or an even darker brown, almost black.

Sri Lankan Delight carries everything in the way of curry products, from raw whole spice seeds to curry pastes for making quick curries to ready-to eat canned curries.

Curry Powders: In Sri Lanka, where meals are prepared in family groups or where many families have a cook, various spice mixtures are ground by hand daily. Some households rely on a woman spice-grinder who makes her living going from house to house grinding spices. The cook crushes roasted or unroasted spices on a stone slab with a fat cylindrical roller about the size of a mortadella and blends them into various curry mixtures.

Large cans of dark-roasted and regular-roasted curry powders are stacked in their own niche against the back wall and on the shelves opposite. The raw curry, a blend of unroasted coriander, cumin, fennel, rampe and other spices, is made without any chile. There are also red curries. The Jaffna-style, packed in a cellophane bag, is loaded with chile along with the same spices found in as the raw curry. Ma’s brand curry, in foil packages, is the hottest in the store, according to Perera.

Blends for Specific Curries: McCurrie brand and Curry Mate, two lines of dry curry spice mixtures, are the Sri Lankan equivalent of Hamburger Helper. Curry Mate, in paper packets, offers a different seasoning blend for fish, chicken, pork, beef and mutton as well as a sambol mix and raw curry powder.

McCurrie brand blends have the same chicken curry recipe on the back of every package whether it holds roasted curry powder or red curry for pork. But most packets also have a stick-on label with the recipe that pertains to the contents of the bag--go with the stick-on recipes.

Curry Pastes in Jars: If you’ve ever seen those Indian or Thai curry pastes, you’ll recognize these Sri Lankan counterparts. You prepare most of them by adding broth or coconut milk and the appropriate solid ingredients. Larich brand offers pastes for beef, pork, chicken, mutton (lamb) and fish curry as well as a buriyani mix to cook with rice, meat and onions. Curry Mate packs pastes for crab curry and vegetarian curry in little plastic jars.

Canned Curries: You won’t find anything as prosaic as chicken or beef in this selection. These curries tend to use the cuisine’s more esoteric ingredients. For instance, ambul thiyal , a sour curry of local tuna, is seasoned with goraka (see herbs and seasonings). Other curries are based on jack fruit seed, drumsticks (an unusual okra-like vegetable), fresh cashews, shark and Asian eggplant.

Rasam Mix: According to one of the shop’s customers, this deep ocher-colored paste is a sort of all-purpose gravy base. You can use it for soup or turn it into a lentil gravy to serve with flat breads like hoppers or dosai . (“To make gravy, cook onions and then add lentils, water and the mix,” the store advises). You can also season vegetables by cooking them in water flavored with rasam mix.

Mulligatawny Mix: British tea plantation owners loved this famous soup--the English idea of what Indian food should be. This modern incarnation is made with a concentrated paste from a jar. Cook some of the mix with two pounds of vegetables in water or milk. Some cookbook’s recipes for mulligatawny include cream or thick coconut milk and you may want to enrich the soup with a few spoonfuls of either one before serving.

SPECIALTY CONVENIENCE MIXES AND COOKING IMPLEMENTS

Along with curries and sambols Sri Lankans serve all sorts of flat breads, pancakes and other flour products to soak up all those sauces. The shop carries a selection of convenient mixes to make these breads. It also stocks the special implements needed to prepare them authentically.

Hopper Mix: The hopper (as the English quaintly pronounced the word aappam ) is a mainstay of the Sri Lankan table, a sort of rice and coconut-milk pancake. This mix is one of the most popular items in the store. Officially, hoppers should be cooked in a deeply curved iron hopper pan, sometimes stocked here or in Indian stores; a wok is usually too thin and too wide to make good hoppers. I tried the mix using my crepe maker and was successful, although my hoppers were flat instead of having the traditional dome shape.

Coconut Reamer: There’s no denying that fresh coconut meat and the coconut milk made from it have no equal. Many Asian cookbooks go into elaborate detail over how to crack coconuts and scrape out the fresh meat by hand. Few Asian cooks do this anymore. Markets in Southeast Asia always have a coconut meat seller who has an electrically powered tool that simply winds like an old-fashioned meat grinder to ream the meat from its shell. Sri Lankan Delight sells a miniature version of this tool. It easily clamps to a table or bread-board but you’ll have to provide the energy yourself.

Instant String Hoppers: String hoppers are doily-like patties made from randomly swirled strands of a rice flour and coconut milk batter; they often take the place of rice at Sri Lankan meals. Even when a cook makes use of the handy string hopper-forming tool, preparing string hoppers is a time-consuming task. These pre-made instant hoppers rehydrate after a few minutes in boiling hot water. They’re made in a white rice version and a deep purplish red rice version.

String Hopper Tool: For cooks who want to make string hoppers from scratch, the shop sells rice flour and a special string hopper form that pushes dough into the doily shapes.

Pittu Mix: A crumbly, steamed, tube-shaped cake called pittu is another curry-absorbent starch best eaten with the fingers. To the pittu mix, which is a blend of red rice flour and wheat flour, you add freshly scraped coconut. Traditionally it’s steamed in bamboo, but many cooks now use an aluminum pittu steamer, sold here, that looks like a little potbellied stove.

HERBS AND SEASONINGS

Sri Lankan Delight keeps fresh lemon grass and several other fresh herbs in its cooler at the back of the store.

Rampe: Known as pandan leaves in Malaysia and Singapore and bai toey in Thailand, this sword-shaped delicate tasting leaf is often used to flavor and color sweets. But in Sri Lanka it turns up in most curries. The store sells fresh rampe leaves cut into uniform lengths and packaged in plastic envelopes.

Curry Leaves: Totally unlike curry powders, which are a blend of spices, curry leaves are the leaf of a tree used as an herb. Their shape and color resembles a bay leaf, but they are as thin and delicate as a basil leaf. Slightly tangy, but musky and mild, the taste of curry leaves is said to enhance curry dishes like nothing else.

Gottukola: This herb, which grows near water, is a little like fresh coriander but rather more like watercress. It’s used as an herb and also eaten as a vegetable. The leaves are often used for a mallung , the term given to cooked leafy greens seasoned with Maldive fish, a touch of curry seasonings and just a little grated coconut. Sri Lankan Delight often sells gottukola fresh, but it also comes minced in glass jars, a form which is simply served plain as an accompaniment to rice. (One reason for its popularity is that it is believed to thicken the hair and help maintain youthful-looking skin.)

Goraka: When fresh, this native Sri Lankan fruit is sour and orange colored. It separates into segments that, when dried, look like tiny, cylindrical charcoal-brown pellets. Goraka is soaked and used to give a sour taste to certain fish curries and other fish dishes. Few curries call for goraka but specific pork curries and young jack fruit curry require it. Dried goraka comes packaged in plastic bags.

Maldive Fish: Chips or shreds of dried, salted Indian Ocean tuna imported to Sri Lanka from the Maldive Islands are an essential ingredient in much of Sri Lankan food--especially sambols and pachadis. The dried fish makes a tasty garnish for a tomato, cucumber and onion salad, one customer told me.

CHUTNEYS, PICKLES, PACHADIS AND SAMBOLS

Along with its aromatic soups and curries, the Sri Lankan repertoire includes a seemingly endless parade of small side dish accompaniments to enhance its may rice varieties and flour products. Perera and one of the shop’s customers explained the difference between them:

Chutneys are usually a little sweet, not too hot and they are always eaten on the side.

Sambols are drier and may serve as a condiment or simply be mixed with rice to flavor it.

Pachadis , are usually based on fish and chiles. They are wetter than sambols and less sweet than chutneys.

Chutneys: The Sri Lankan Delight chutney selection includes ambarella made from a fruit related to the mango and preserved with cardamom, ginger and cinnamon. The date chutney looks like a sweet brown jam but has the familiar garlic, ginger, chile trio of basic chutney seasonings. There are also mango chutneys and lime-date chutney preserved with mustard and dill seeds with chile in sesame oil.

Pickles: Nary a cucumber in sight in this selection of pickles. Instead you’ll find whole garlic cloves pickled with chile powder, sugar and vinegar or whole pickled limes seasoned with garlic, dill seeds and chile and brinjal pahi --eggplant pickle flavored with green chile.

Sambols and Pachadis: These pepper relishes have countless variations. At home they can be made with just about any food you can imagine. There are fresh coconut sambols , carrot sambols and bean sprout sambols.

Prepared sambols are a little more limited but they do include seeni sambol . This blend of slowly fried onions with lots of chile and Maldive fish is one of the cuisine’s most familiar. There’s also a seeni sambol mix that incorporates all the necessary spices and dry fish to blend with your own slowly fried onion. Also look for kata sambol , the same chile heat enhanced with a touch of cinnamon.

Similar to sambols but neither as spicy-hot or as dry, pachadis are made with prawns or with kingfish, dates and ginger.

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Two good sources for Sri Lankan recipes are “Fire and Spice--the Cuisine of Sri Lanka” by Heather Jansz Balasuriya (McGraw-Hill) and “The Complete Asian Cookbook” by Charmaine Solomon (C.E. Tuttle).

This recipe for red shrimp curry, adapted from “The Complete Asian Cookbook,” can be the centerpiece of an easy-to-make Sri Lankan meal. It tastes very little like Indian curries but rather more like Thai food. Serve it with rice and instant string hoppers. Accompanying chutneys, and sambols may be purchased ready-made. All the seasoning ingredients for this curry are available at Sri Lankan Delight.

RED SHRIMP CURRY

1 1/2 pounds whole small, raw shrimp

1 medium onion, finely chopped

3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger

1 small stick cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon fenugreek seeds

2 to 3 curry leaves

1 small stem lemon grass, slightly crushed

1 strip rampe leaf

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1 1/2 teaspoons red, Sri Lankan style chile powder

2 teaspoons paprika

1 teaspoon salt

2 cups coconut milk (fresh, frozen, canned or prepared from a mix)

Fresh lemon juice

Wash and de-head shrimp, leaving shells on. In saucepan, combine onion, garlic, ginger, cinnamon, fenugreek, curry leaves, lemon grass, rampe leaf, turmeric, chile powder, paparika, salt and coconut milk. Simmer uncovered until onions are tender, about 20 minutes. Add shrimp and cook until barely firm. Squeeze in lemon juice to taste. Serve with rice or hoppers. Makes 6 servings.

Each serving contains about:

260 calories; 545 mg sodium; 138 mg cholesterol; 18 grams fat; 6 grams carbohydrates; 21 grams protein; 2.13 grams fiber.