Lamprais — Sri Lanka

Lamprais is a Sri Lankan dish built around rice that has been cooked in meat stock, served together with a mixed meat curry, small fried meatballs known as frikkadels, an eggplant curry, a chili-and-shrimp-paste sambal, and half a hard-boiled egg, all wrapped together in a banana leaf. The dish is tied to the country's Dutch Burgher population, and its name is an anglicised form of a Dutch word for a bundle or parcel of rice. Some accounts also point to a link with the Indonesian dish lemper, given the shared idea of rice wrapped in leaves. To assemble it, rice is first partly cooked in stock, then the separate components, meat curry, frikkadels, eggplant curry and sambal, are prepared on the side. All the elements are layered onto a softened banana leaf, folded into a parcel, and baked, which lets the rice finish cooking while absorbing the aromas of the curries and of the leaf itself. Households and restaurants vary the choice of meats, the heat of the sambal and the exact spicing of the curries, but the format stays recognizable: a banana-leaf parcel that opens to reveal rice surrounded by several small, distinct dishes meant to be eaten together.