Kandyan Village Tour from Kandy with a Rice and Curry Cooking Class

This is the village morning with the cooking made central rather than incidental. You see the countryside working — cinnamon peeled by hand, a tapper up a coconut palm drawing toddy, spice plots where pepper and cardamom grow together — and then you cook with what comes out of it.

Rice and curry is the national meal and it is badly named in English: it is not a curry with rice but six or seven separate dishes eaten together, each cooked its own way. A dhal tempered with curry leaves and mustard seed. A coconut sambol pounded with chilli and lime. A jackfruit or a green bean cooked down in coconut milk. A fried fish or an egg curry. All of it built on a spice base ground fresh.

You do the work: grating coconut on a traditional hiramanaya scraper, grinding the spice paste on a stone, cooking in clay pots over a wood fire, which behaves nothing like a gas ring and is half the lesson. The host corrects as you go.

Then you sit down and eat what you made, which after a morning of grinding and grating tastes considerably better than it would have in a restaurant.