Words: Tina Edward Gunawardhana
Photographs: Carol Sachs and Alex Lau
Taking London by storm first with her cookbook Rambutan and then with her restaurant of the same name at Borough Market, London’s food mecca, Brit Lankan Cynthia Shanmugalingam is cooking up a storm of interest in Sri Lankan cuisine. Reputed chefs across the world have been waxing lyrical about her cookbook which was included in the New York Times Cookbooks of the Year and won her the Fortnum and Mason Debut Cookery Book Award. Cynthia uses language skilfully to write beautiful narratives about various aspects of Sri Lankan cuisine. Her book is described as a “joy-filled love letter to Sr Lanka with tender family stories of the island.” Armed with an MA (Cantab) Economics from the University of Cambridge, Cynthia’s approach to Sri Lankan cooking and its execution has earned her plaudits from all of London’s restaurant critics, even the most harshest ones. And that is saying something about her restaurant and the food she serves! Writer and restaurateur combined, Cynthia is fiercely proud of her Sri Lankan Tamil heritage and it comes through with so much passion in her cuisine. Despite generations of Sri Lankans settling in the UK since the 1940s and running various Sri Lankan restaurants, no one has been able to garner such a volume of positive interest and present Sri Lankan cuisine in such a holistic manner that encapsulates Sri Lanka in one flavouful mouthful the way Cynthia and her book and restaurant Rambutan have.
What was the pivotal moment when you realised you wanted to pursue a career in food?
My father was a mathematician and left his farming roots in Sri Lanka to come to lecture in statistics in England in 1968, and all of my siblings and I were born there. But my parents never stopped talking about Sri Lanka and our family in Jaffna: the house they grew up in, the paddy fields, the seafood, the cobras, the wells. My first trip to Sri Lanka was in 1982 as a little baby, between the year that our beloved Jaffna library was destroyed and the landmark anti-Tamil riots in 1983. And until I was an adult, I couldn’t go back to our Tamil ancestral home, as it was too unsafe. When in 2012, I finally got to visit our village as an adult and cooked with my mum, going into the fields with my father, I finally understood how magical the cuisine is: fresh coconut milk from coconuts in the garden, crab from the fisherman at Point Pedro, fresh spices from the mill, vegetables from a neighbour, all cooked over fire, so simple, so exciting. That’s when I first thought: this is what is missing in London.
What made you select the name Rambutan for your restaurant?
Rambutans are one of my favourite island fruits! They are so delicious and so distinctive. It’s one word that is the same in Tamil and English and Sinhalese, which makes it special, and that in turn is in part because it is a Javanese loan word. I feel they sort of sum up some of the uniqueness of Sri Lankan food - not every dish or ingredient is indigenous, it comes from the melting pot of our history.
