Short Eats and Hoppers

It was a typical picnic for a city as diverse as Los Angeles. Instead of hamburgers, hot dogs, potato chips and lemonade there were short eats and hoppers, biryani and faluda. Although unusual menus are common enough given the city’s diversity, this one was rare because the food was Sri Lankan, which is hard to find outside Sri Lankan social circles and temple festivals.

Sunday’s spread was sponsored by the Sri Lanka-America Assn. of Southern California to raise funds for victims of the ongoing war in that south Asian island. It was held in Rancho Dominguez Seminary Park, and the broad green expanse rimmed with palm trees called to mind the rice fields and tropical foliage of Sri Lanka.

Some made a meal of “short eats,” which are finger foods such as patties--miniature pastry turnovers stuffed with spiced meat--and curry-stuffed Chinese rolls, so-called because they resemble spring rolls.

A lineup of women cooked hoppers--concave Sri Lankan “pancakes” that were served with chicken or albacore curry and spicy sambals. There were stringhoppers too--slim, pale steamed noodles to eat with curry.

Muslim women staffed a booth serving biryani, spiced rice cooked with chicken and accompanied by a hard-boiled egg and pickled vegetables. They also stirred up a pot of iced faluda--a creamy, sweet drink flavored with rose syrup.

Sweets ranged from homemade pink marshmallows and potato fudge to the Sri Lankan “love cake” and a date and cashew cake representative of the country’s rich European style baked goods.

The Sri Lankan Delight market in Tarzana set up a miniature grocery so that picnickers could stock up on Sri Lankan imports such as unpolished red rice, roasted curry powder, jaggery sugar, canned drumstick curry and passion fruit cordial.

Foods to go included one of Sri Lanka’s most interesting and complicated specialties, lamprais. This dish could be best described as a complete rijstaffel in a package. In the Dutch colonial era in Southeast Asia, the rijstaffel (rice table), was a meal of rice with many curries and other accompaniments brought by a procession of waiters.

Sunday’s lamprais included curried beef, chicken and goat; beef meatballs, sweet and sour eggplant curry, seasoned rice and a spicy Indonesian style sambal. All this was wrapped in banana leaves in a foil pan ready to reheat in the oven--a convenience necessary in a country where processions of waiters are few.

The Sri Lanka-America Assn. can be reached at (310) 915-6677.