Patties (Sri Lankan) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Patties are a filled fry: wheat dough wrapped around a filling, crimped into a half-moon, and dropped into hot oil. In Sri Lanka they belong to the "short eats," the small snacks bought on the street or at a tea shop, sized for one hand and best while the crust is still fragrant and hot. The usual filling is spiced fish and potato.

The wheat for the dough and the fish for the filling both came from the island. The potato did not. A tuber of the South American highlands, it arrived in the hill country of Ceylon only after 1800. John Davy, a British army physician, wrote in his 1821 account of the island's interior that in the European gardens of the Kandyan highlands "other vegetables, that have been tried, as potatoes and onions, have also succeeded," while the roots grown by islanders themselves he listed as sweet potatoes. The chronological table of the Ceylon Almanac for 1851 records that in 1823 plantations of potatoes were established in the Kandyan Provinces. Until the tuber took hold in those hill gardens, a patty filled the way patties are filled today had no way of existing on the island.

The dish therefore took its present form in the British period, some time after the opening decades of the nineteenth century. When its name was first written down is not yet known.

The gathering of these snacks under the single name "short eats," and their spread as everyday street food, came later still. Bakeries such as Perera & Sons were selling them in the 1960s, and by the 1970s they were daily fare in Colombo.

The half-moon of a patty looks much like the Portuguese pastel and empada, or the empanada. From that likeness grew the view that a filled fry carried over while Portugal governed Ceylon, from 1505 to 1658, settled in and took root on the island. The version stuffed with fish and potato is placed by the same accounts in the line of bolinho, the salt-cod-and-potato croquette.

That telling runs aground at the filling. The potato entered Ceylon's soil under the British: trials in the Kandyan hill gardens succeeded around 1819 and 1820, and plantations were opened in 1823. Portuguese rule had ended more than a century and a half earlier. The half-moon shape itself may well have come from Portugal, but the fish-and-potato filling that defines the snack today can only be a thing of the 1820s or after.

The year the potato arrived carries an error of its own, repeated for a long time. Sri Lanka's agricultural authorities and international potato references have written that the explorer Samuel Baker brought it in 1850. Baker's own travel account of 1855, however, describes Nuwara Eliya as he first saw it in 1846 and 1847: "It apparently produced nothing except potatoes." The highland was potato country before he ever settled there.

The other account looks to the British colonial period. Cutlets and patties arrived with the British, so it is said, with the croquette culture of the intervening Dutch period named as a further influence. This side has a contemporary record. A household cookery book for British India, published in Bombay in 1849, indexes chicken, oyster and fish patties, and under "A good paste for patties" directs the cook to knead local coarse-ground wheat with water, roll it thin, spread it with butter, roll it up, and "cut it out the size of your patties." Small parcels of folded pastry were already a fixed form in the kitchens of British South Asia at that date.

That, though, is the patty of British India, not a record of the Sri Lankan patty itself. Whether the snack descends from a Portuguese shape or a British pastry, the two accounts stand side by side, neither carrying a decisive record. What is settled is the date on the side of the filling.