Watalappan Period COrigin theory BVerified

Watalappan (also spelled Wattalappam) is a custard-like sweet: dark, toasty palm jaggery drawn from the kithul palm is dissolved into coconut milk and egg, scented with cardamom, and steamed until firm. The sticky-sweet palm sugar, the mellow coconut milk, and the eggs were all long-established on this island, ordinary things within easy reach. Poured into a bowl and steamed slowly until set, that plain making yields a rich dish that graces the festive table.

It is cherished in Sri Lankan Muslim society, and especially among the Malay people (the Ja Minissu), as a celebration sweet, indispensable at Eid and at weddings. In time it crossed the boundaries of the community and spread across the island, and today it is known as one of Sri Lanka's signature sweets.

Watalappan's origins have long been spoken of as though disputed. But as for the pedigree of the sweet itself, one view has now settled.

From the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) transported people from Java and the Malay archipelago to the island of Ceylon as exiles and soldiers. The Sri Lankan Malays (the Ja Minissu) who arrived this way brought with them a sweet from home called serikaya -- egg, coconut milk, and palm sugar steamed until firm. It met the island's kithul palm jaggery and turned into a local festive sweet. Asiff Hussein, a longtime scholar of Sri Lankan Muslim society, judges the sweet in all likelihood a borrowing from the Malay world.

What lingers as kindling for debate is instead the name. Some read watalappan as inheriting the Tamil vattil (bowl) and appam (a sweet cake); others read it as the Dutch vla, meaning custard, worn down in the mouths of the Moor community. The trail is old. According to Hussein's ethnography, the list of Dutch loanwords that Louis Nell contributed to the scholarly journal The Orientalist in 1888-89 records that the Moors called this custard by the Dutch word vla, and that the sweet also had a local name, vattil-appan. In the same passage Hussein also notes that this sweet was unknown to the Tamils -- the Tamil spelling is the trace of a borrowed name, not a sign that its makers were Tamil.

By the end of the nineteenth century, then, the sweet is said to have gone by two names side by side: the Dutch vla and the local vattil-appan. Which reading of today's name is right has not been settled. Whichever way it falls, the question is about what the sweet has been called; it does not unsettle the pedigree of the sweet itself as a descendant of the Malay steamed custard. The earliest example a dictionary gives of the name watalappam in English writing dates from 1956, but that is merely the earliest use the dictionary cites, not the year the sweet came into being. The sweet that crossed the sea had been granted its name on this island long before, and only then became Watalappan.