February 2024
For the last twenty years I have been a food historian/ food writer focusing on Australian cuisine. In the course of doing research for my book True to the Land. A History of Food in Australia I had occasion to write about Doris Ady and Charmaine Solomon two Australian cookery book authors who included Sri Lankan recipes in their books. Reading Ady again recently I was struck by this from her Foreword:
‘I have written this book for the Australian and New Zealand housewife, for whom I have the greatest admiration, who is game to tackle anything and taste everything, and whose adventurous spirit has raised the standard of local cuisine to international heights. …There is one branch of cooking, however, in which she is a little inexperienced, that of the cuisine of South East Asia … So I hope this this little book will open up to her the infinite connotations of the word ‘curry’ and introduce to her the art of spice cooking, an art which her neighbours on the vast Asian continent have practiced for centuries.’
I wondered what opportunities Ady’s ‘housewives’ had to encounter Sri Lankan cuisine in print media – Australian newspapers, magazines, and cookery books – and what they would have learned about Sri Lankan cuisine from them. Sri Lankan cuisine has been a part of the Australian foodscape since at least 1895 when the earliest recipe for Ceylonese curries I found was published. So, I widened the scope of my research to look at what Ady’s time travelling ‘housewives’ would understand was Sri Lankan cuisine at key moments in publishing recipes for it from 1895 to 2023. (I will use the term home cook instead of housewife/wives from here on.)
