Lamprais: The Dutch-Sri Lankan Dish Wrapped in a Banana Leaf

Rice, curry and meatballs baked inside a banana leaf. Lamprais is Sri Lanka’s most unusual dish and its history is stranger than the food.

Unwrap a lamprais and you understand immediately why people get attached to it. Everything arrives together, steamed inside a banana leaf, and the smell that comes off it when you open it is the whole appeal.

What is in it

A lamprais is a complete meal in one parcel. Rice cooked in stock, a meat curry, frikkadels which are small fried meatballs, a fried ash plantain or aubergine, a sambol, and sometimes a boiled egg. All of it packed into a banana leaf and baked so the flavours steam into each other.

The leaf is not decoration. It is the cooking vessel, and it gives the rice a faint grassy aroma you cannot get any other way.

The strange history

Lamprais comes from Sri Lanka’s Dutch Burgher community, descendants of Dutch colonists who stayed. The name comes from the Dutch lomprijst, roughly a lump of rice. It is a genuine hybrid: Dutch technique, Sri Lankan ingredients, and a result that belongs entirely to Sri Lanka.

That is a useful thing to know about Sri Lankan food generally. It absorbed Portuguese, Dutch, British, South Indian and Malay influences and turned all of them into something distinct.

How to eat it

Open the leaf and mix everything together. Do not eat the components separately, that misses the entire point. The rice, curry, sambol and meatball are meant to be combined in each bite.

Why you rarely see it

Because it is a huge amount of work. Every parcel is assembled and wrapped by hand. It only survives where someone cares enough to keep making it, which usually means a family kitchen.

Sri Lankan food in Scarborough

We are a family-run halal Sri Lankan and Indian kitchen in Scarborough, cooking the way it is cooked at home. Start with our guide to the best Sri Lankan dishes to try, or explore Sri Lankan food across the GTA.