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- Imperial Flavours | Travels With Sri Lanka’s Colonial Spices Some of Sri Lanka’s most beloved spices came in the ships of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British – but why were they brought here, and how did they throw off the trauma of transplantation to prosper and proliferate? Sri Lanka’s generous habit of incorporating new ingredients is one of the more positive ways it has responded to the mixed impact of the island’s spice-mad colonial occupiers and traders. To the nine core spices indigenous to the island since the earliest of times, - cinnamon, pepper, long pepper, brindleberries, moringa, curry leaves, gutu kula, the blue butterfly pea flower, and turmeric – up to thirteen others have been introduced through the centuries and have become so commonplace as to be now classified as fully fledged residents. The list includes chilli, cloves, cardamom, ginger, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, pandam leaves, fennel, tamarind, nutmeg, mace, and vanilla. The most famous of these, chilli, a spicy vegetable widely used throughout Asia, only reached Asia in the past five hundred years, originating from Peru and Bolivia before being brought to the attention of a marvelling Spanish court by Christopher Columbus after his first voyage to the New World. In the diaries he kept on his journey, Columbus noted the existence of this new plant in an entry dated 15 January 1493, saying it was “a better spice than our pepper”. Within decades, chilli had become a commonplace plant in Spanish gardens. By the mid-fifteenth century, it was used as a cooking ingredient from Scandinavia to the Balkans. And almost as quickly, the plant also found its way to Sri Lanka, and other parts of Asia, due in large part to the Portuguese and their commercial thirst to control the Indian Ocean trade - and with it, its lucrative spice revenues. The spice’s adoption into Sri Lankan cooking came with an etymological twist for the Singhala term for pepper (“miris”) was transferred to chilli. Pepper was renamed “gam-miris” – literally “village pepper.” Its penetration across the island seems to have been slow if the journals of Robert Knox, the famous British captive of the King of Kandy, are anything to go by. Knox’s book, “The Historical Relation of Ceylon”, published in 1681, recorded just about anything that moved and most things that didn’t. And it fails to mention chilli. More than anything else, this probably indicated the limited reach of the Portuguese settlement, which never properly incorporated the highlands of the Kandyan kingdom. Rich in such vitamins as A, C and E, chilli’s natural chemical compounds, especially capsaicinoid, have prompted a wave of ongoing scientific research into harnessing it to promote weight loss, relieve pain from arthritis, reduce inflammation, control LDL (bad) cholesterol to lower the risk of strokes and heart attacks and regulate blood sugar. Some studies have also indicated its potential to kill cancer cells. But it is, of course, for its taste and flavour that it is most widely celebrated. And in this regard, there are as many influences as there are outcomes. Different varieties of pepper, their ripeness, colour, drying process, and growing conditions – all influence how exactly they taste and smell. Smokey? Fruity? Grassy? Tart? Warm? Hot? Blistering? The vegetable’s extraordinary range and adaptability have ensured it can cover all these bases and more, making it one of the kitchen’s most flexible ingredients. From chilli pickle to chilli con carne, many dishes that incorporate chilli have become household favourites everywhere. Barely a dish in Sri Lanka fails to include it – from sambals and curries to the sweetly exquisitely spicy banana pepper curry - and of course Lunu Miris, one of the island’s top pickles, made from finely chopped onions, red chilli flakes, salt, lime juice, and Maldive fish, and able to go with just about anything—foodies like to debate which cuisines tend to be hotter – Sri Lankan or Indian. But the answer is far from straightforward, as it all depends on which regions you have in mind: the Chettinad or Kandy, Galle or Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu or Jaffna? Three other spices, vanilla, nutmeg and its derivative, mace, also all arrived on the island courtesy of European colonists. Although not hatched from a single silver egg like the mythical Molionidai twins Eurytos and Kteatos, nutmeg and mace are, all the same, the conjoined twins of the spice world, two quite separate kinds of spices derived from the same plant, Myristica fragrans. The nutmeg part of it is the hard, round seed found within the fruit; it has a robust, musky, woody, slightly sweet, and unmistakably aromatic flavour. The mace is the reddish-orange membrane that surrounds the seed, with a scent that hardened Olfactors would describe as floral, citrus, light, and delicate. The tree that bears them is slow-growing, deciduous, relatively narrow-spreading, but able to reach heights of 20 to 30 meters. As you would expect from such a special spice, the trees inhabit the fussy end of propagation, demanding rich, well-drained soil at around 500 meters, nicely distributed rainfall of about 2,500 mm per year, a decent amount of shade, especially in their first years, and temperatures that range from 20 to 30 degrees. The trees have a staggeringly limited commercial history, with all specimens worldwide deriving from plants that once grew only on the Banda Islands, a collection of islets that make up the 17,508 islands that comprise Indonesia today. Identified by the Portuguese as a primary source of revenue, the spice became one of the most tightly controlled monopolies of the Indian Ocean trade. The Arab traders who had been carrying and selling it across the region were muscled out, and until 1621, the Portuguese managed to keep trade in this spice to themselves. Naturally, this also meant a tight grip on production, and the various Portuguese governors across the East Indies took special care to ensure that no live plants escaped from Banda. When the Dutch eventually stormed the Banda Islands and wrested control of nutmeg from the Portuguese, little else really changed. The Dutch VOC Company maintained as tight a grip on the production, transport, and marketing of spices as its colonial predecessors did. This state of affairs continued until 1810, when the British captured most of the Dutch East Indies territories, including the Banda Islands. Although the islands were returned to the Dutch 4 years later, the British had by then taken particular care to uproot as many nutmeg trees as possible for distribution and regrowth across their own Empire – including Sri Lanka, which it formally gained in 1802 at the Treaty of Amiens. It is possible that the monopoly was quietly ended a few years earlier, if reports of the French seizing a cargo of Dutch nutmeg trees and carrying them off to the Caribbean are to be believed. Either way, the nutmeg monopoly had been ended. By the early eighteenth century, the first nutmeg plantations in South Asia were recorded in Kerala, just across the sea from Sri Lanka itself, the work of an enterprising Scottish planter. Exactly when they came to Sri Lanka and where they were first planted is a matter of mildly rumbustious academic debate. The global market for both species is relatively small in value, oscillating around 250 million dollars annually, with half coming from Indonesia and Sri Lanka accounting for about five per cent of the total, mostly from small plantations around Kandy, Kegalle, and Matale. But not Galagedera, sadly, for the nutmeg trees that once grew here had to be removed to safeguard the life of the miniature schnauzers that also live on The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. The spices’ active compound, myristicin, can easily kill a curious dog bent, as are our schnauzers, on chewing anything interesting they might find during their daily walks. But not all its chemical properties are toxic. The species also contains elemicin, a compound currently being researched for its antidepressant properties, its ability to modulate gut flora, and its promotion of overall health. Harvesting nutmeg is far from simple – the art lies almost wholly in the drying process. Too dry and they are so depleted of oil as to lose all flavour. Too moist, and mould develops. The mace coating the pod is best removed straight from the shell in a single go, forming one piece, for cleaning and drying. Nowadays, it has found its way into several popular, preprepared spice mixtures, such as garam masala. Still, it is more classically known as the one spice equally at home in sweet and savoury dishes - game pies, apple crumble, Swedish meatballs, eggnog, macaroni cheese, chutneys, curries, Christmas pudding, frittatas, quiches. Indeed, in the seventeenth century, the beau monde Europeans would carry their own personal nutmeg graters to season food to their own particular liking. Sri Lankan nutmeg is best known as a key ingredient in watalappam, the island’s version of crème caramel, a spicy coconut custard sweetened with jaggery. Mace, given its more delicate flavour, is perhaps best enjoyed in Congee, a comfort food like few others – a rice porridge made with coconut milk, and heavily flavoured with herbs, vegetables, and mace. Vanilla is the other great spice introduced to the island by its colonists. It is the Mummy of all spices – its taste, connotations, associations, and aroma reminding you of the perfect home, overseen by someone not unlike Mrs Darling in Peter Pan or Tove Jansson’s beloved Moominmamma. It originated in Mexico and, for centuries, was exported to Europe and elsewhere by the Spanish. It is perhaps the fussiest of all species to grow, as only the Melipona bee and two species of Mexican hummingbirds can ensure the pollination of the tiny flowers to create the vanilla pods. The bees and the birds, patriotic to a fault, refused to live outside Mexico, and it was not until 1841 that a twelve-year-old slave, Edmond Albius, discovered how to hand-pollinate the plant. The vanilla market that this discovery was to go on to create is today valued at well over six billion dollars, though much good it did poor Albius. It took years for his French masters to even unenslaved him, and he was to die in poverty and neglect by 1880. His obituary in a local newspaper noted that “the very man who, at great profit to his colony, discovered how to pollinate vanilla flowers has died in the hospital at Sainte-Suzanne. It was a destitute and miserable end. His long-standing request for an allowance never brought a response.” Eighty per cent of the world's vanilla now comes from Madagascar, with Sri Lanka making up such a tiny percentage as to be all but invisible. Even so, attempts were made to raise the crop here. The Burgher planter Antoine Joseph Van der Porten planted acres of the vine on his plantation in Halgolla, just thirty-five miles from Galagedera. It should have been a triumph as the island, especially around Kandy, had the perfect climate and environment for the plant. Little capital investment was needed to raise it, and it showed a strong resistance to disease and pests. Its failure to take off was perhaps in part due to the lingering complexity of self-pollution. However, its execution, as Ananda, our head gardener, knows, is relatively straightforward once learned. Using a thin stick or even a blade of grass, the flower’s flap is opened, and the stamen and stigma are gently pressed together. Bingo. Never had sex been so untroubled. The pods, once grown, require careful processing before they are fit for market. The beans need to be heat-treated to stop growth and activate the enzymes that produce the pod’s flavour. They then need to be wrapped up to ferment to bring out their flavour. Several weeks of sun drying follow; the pods are turned daily before they are left to rest for three months to mature. What few vines exist in the country have lingered in the imagination of vanilla dreamers, and connoisseurs claim that Sri Lankan vanilla has a subtler, caramel-like, and more delicate flavour than Madagascan vanilla. Egged on by the indefatigable Sri Lanka Export Development Board, attempts are being made to increase production, and the Kandy-based Vanilla Grower Association now claims to have 1000 members. After several attempts to grow it on our estate, it has finally come to flourish within the boundaries of our Spice Garden, the cuttings scrambling up glericidia poles in the warm, humid, partial shade of the space they now occupy. Their flowers, which last but a day, usually bloom from December to February; once pollinated, the pods take about eight more months to develop before they can be harvested. The pod has an astonishing 250 chemical properties to it, one of which, vanillin, is known to increase serotonin production - the happy hormone. More excitable scientists are also busy investigating how it increases male testosterone levels, making it an aphrodisiac. Others, perhaps more grounded, are focusing on its ability to promote healthy ageing and better memory, combat indigestion and insomnia, and help reduce the risk of sickle cell blood disorders. But it is, of course, best known today as a cooking ingredient, its warm, decadent, woody fragrance making cakes, ice cream, milkshakes, yoghurts, custards, and pies the kind of dishes that live on in your imagination long after you have consumed them. Here in Sri Lanka, it is most lovingly associated with Sri Lankan Butter Cake. This cake is a happy evolution of the classic English pound cake, which first appeared in 18th-century London in Hannah Glasse's 1747 cookbook, The Art of Cookery. Flour, baking powder, lots of butter, eggs, salt, milk, and vanilla make up the cake itself and – for Sri Lanka anyway – it is frosted with passion fruit butter and filled with chopped mangos. That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.