Patties (Sri Lankan) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Patties are a filled fry: wheat dough wrapped around a filling, crimped into a half-moon shape, and deep-fried. In Sri Lanka they are a fixture among the "short eats," the small snacks people pick up on the street or at a tea shop.

The wheat that makes the dough and the fish used in some fillings were available on the island. The potato that now defines the standard filling is another matter. The potato is a New World plant, brought into South Asia by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century. Until that tuber had crossed the sea and entered the island's kitchens, a potato patty had no way of coming into being. Alongside the fish version, an imported ingredient was taken up into a local snack.

Folding the dough into a half-moon and frying it gives a snack that can be held in one hand and eaten while the fry is still fragrant and hot. It is an everyday thing, bought by someone passing through the street.

The half-moon fry of a patty closely resembles the Portuguese pastel and empada, or the empanada. The version filled with fish and potato is read by some as belonging to the line of bolinho, the salt-cod-and-potato croquette, and one account holds that a dish brought over while Portugal governed Ceylon, from 1505 to 1658, settled in and took root on the island.

A separate account looks to the British colonial period. Here patties and cutlets are treated as descendants of the meat pastry the British introduced, and it is said that "cutlets and patties arrived with the British." The croquette culture of the intervening Dutch period is noted as an influence as well. Which route to treat as primary remains an open question, with the accounts standing side by side.

Either way, the gathering of these snacks under the single name "short eats" and their spread as everyday food came only in the twentieth century. In the 1960s bakeries such as Perera & Sons began selling them, and by the 1970s they had become daily fare in Colombo. The half-moon fry itself reaches back to the colonial period, but the layer in which it settled as a casual street snack is much more recent.

Patties are widely identified with the fish empanada, and in that sense they belong to the same medieval Islamic tradition of filled pies as the empanada. Their direct parent, though, is a colonial pastry complex, Portuguese, British, and Dutch by turns, with no single ancestor firmly established.