It’s sweet, the colour of the night flecked with pieces of cashew nuts and the unmistakable aroma of coconut milk. As if reading my mind, chef Lisa Sadanah (who prefers to go by her first name), confirms: “It’s not dodol.”
The ‘not dodol’ is a Sri Lankan sweet, watalappam, which has a lot in common with the Goan dessert—both are made with palm jaggery, coconut milk, and topped with roasted cashew nuts. The watalappam contains egg, which is folded into the coconut and jaggery mixture, and then steamed. Much like dodol, it is delicious.
Served in a ramekin, the watalappam is the only dessert on the menu at the recently opened Sri Lankan bar and bistro, The Jaffna Jump, where Lisa is chef and partner. It’s also the only dish that is not Lisa’s creation but that of her mother, Barbara John, who learnt the recipe from a friend during her time in the island country. “My mum is a home science student, so she weighs everything out and won’t mess with the recipe,” says the Calcutta-born chef whose family moved to Sri Lanka in 1983. That was a time of turmoil, when the country was simmering with anti-Tamil pogroms and war was imminent. “We heard the gunfire and the bombs, we went through curfews, we’ve seen the bodies in the rivers...I’ve been through it all,” recalls Lisa, who lived there till 1998, and has an indelible connection with the country.
It’s a connection that has often shown up in the form of comforting plates in trying times. “In the lockdown, we would do potlucks and I always cooked Sri Lankan food...Since then, my friends would encourage me to join the home chef scene,” shares Lisa, who in 2021, did turn her passion into a catering venture, Bentota Box—named after the Bentota River where she would jetski as a child. Today, the link has only grown stronger with her first restaurant, which she named after the region that was home to a majority of Sri Lanka’s Tamilian population.
