Lamprais Period COrigin theory CVerified

Lamprais is an elaborate main dish in which seasoned rice is served with several curries, sambols (relishes), and frikkadel (meat balls), the whole assembly wrapped in a banana leaf and baked together. The name comes from the Dutch lomprijst, a lump or packet of rice.

The people who made it were the Burghers, a community of Dutch, Portuguese, and Sri Lankan descent. Rather than carrying a European dish over intact, they built a festive meal of their own by joining rice, the Asian staple, with the spices of the island. The chili that carries the heat of the curries is a New World plant, brought to Sri Lanka by the Portuguese across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lamprais sits at the point where that imported spice had settled into the local table.

Packing several dishes' worth of food into one leaf, then setting the leaf itself over the fire so its scent works into the rice, is not the manner of an everyday meal but of a celebration. Lamprais has been handed down as a festive dish of the Burghers.

The account that gives Lamprais its name from the Dutch lomprijst and credits it to the Burghers who settled in Dutch Ceylon (1658 to 1796) rests on fairly firm ground.

A second view traces the lineage further back. Java has a snack called lemper, seasoned meat and glutinous rice wrapped in a banana leaf, and this line holds that the Dutch carried it from the Dutch East Indies to Ceylon and reworked it into Lamprais. Where lemper stays a steamed snack, however, Lamprais grew into a substantial main course, gaining several curries, sambols, and meat balls, all wrapped in a leaf and baked. The route that would connect the two is told as running from the East Indies to Ceylon, though the direct evidence for it is thin.

The dish first appears in print in 1929, in the Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book edited by Hilda Deutrom. That only shows that it existed by then; the dish itself is thought to reach back into the Dutch colonial period.

One misreading is worth clearing away. Because Lamprais is so often called Dutch, it is easy to assume that a dish from the Netherlands was carried over as it was. It was not: the Dutch at home did not know this food. What the Burghers of Dutch Ceylon did was fold the island's rice and spices together with the leaf-wrapping technique of the East Indies. "Dutch" here means the Dutch colony of Ceylon, not the mother country.