Traditional New Year preparations :

Exploring yesteryear's festive delicacies

By Ganga Ratnayake

As the entire island starts beaming in excitement and prepares to celebrate the upcoming Sinhala and Tamil New Year, I happen to relish a little tour back into the past in quest of the festive delicacies from yesteryear. I was guided there by Indra Bowatte and Bandula Mallika Wadugodapitiya who recounted how people used to prepare for the New Year in the olden days, besides how to make those irresistibly mouth-watering sweetmeats.

The Sinhala and Tamil New Year can be redefined as a culmination of the local food culture. It is a time when all the goodies hidden and forgotten for the rest of the year begin to emerge and glimmer under limelight. You will find dozen odd delectable dishes at a typical traditional New Year table, and they almost always include milk rice, two or three types of kevum, aluva, aggala, kokis and banana. Of course the choice foods during festival days differ from one region to another, offering a wide choice of flavours to tickle your taste buds no end.

In the countryside homes, preparing for the traditional New Year happens at least since a month before the big day. And the outer kitchens, special huts made just for making sweetmeats in large quantities, are covered in misty steam rising from the large woks and pots.

Take a tour among the local households during the festival day and you're bound to encounter the well known sweetmeats such as athirasa, mung kevum, narang kavum, dodol, undu wel, weli thalapa, konda kevum and aasmi as much as the lesser known handi kevum, seeni pittu, lalu and achchu kema. But of course, some of these foods seem to have merged with time while some have been adapted.

Sweetness

The secret of the sweetness of these foods lie in the finest kitul treacle (liquid jaggery) extracted from the fishtail palm, but there are also sweets prepared using sugar syrup. Rice flour, especially Kekulu rice, is a staple ingredient in most of these dishes. The flour is made after immersing the Kekulu rice in water, then completely draining the water, and grounding the dried rice using mortar and pestle.

To prepare some types of food the rice flour needs to be roasted before using. And to prepare the sweet and spicy aggala they use the Kurahan gala (stone grinder for grinding finger millet).

You don't get to see many fruits on a festive table but bananas are a must, dominated by ambul kesel or koli kuttu. Not only do they add more flavours and aromas but they also add colour and life to the table. At the auspicious time for eating, the head of the household feeds everyone in the family with a morsel of milk rice mixed with the auspicious sweetmeats (usually kevum, jaggery and sesame rolls). But to savour the rest of milk rice on a platter the spicy side-dishes like polos ambula, achcharu, lunu dehi, ambul thiyal or hath maluva are served.

The table on the festive day not only has food, but also features a small brass oil lamp accompanied by bulath thattuwa (tray full of betel leaves). And before anyone gets to savour the food, morsels of each food are offered to the Buddha as a ritual.

Of course the festival day is full of rituals and days following or prior will also have many rituals.

But what's intriguing is that millions of people in one country stop and resume working at the same time, begin to eat at the same time and even pay respect to their elders at the same time.

Culture

Despite having a rich food culture flaunting myriads of flavours and tastes, nowadays people tend to arrange their festive tables with store bought sweetmeats for convenience. Sadly it cannot be helped in a competitive world where people tend to get busy round the clock. Yet there is no better time than the forthcoming New Year to remind us once more, that it is our duty to cherish and pass on the art of preparing these delicacies and their uniquely diverse tastes to the future generations.