A Recipe Book of Traditional Sri Lankan Food

Although a number of various traditional foods and diversity of cooking styles and techniques were available in Sri Lanka, today most of them are getting lost as a result of ‘modernization’ dietary patterns. However, in Sri Lanka,a very limited number of researcheshave been conducted on traditional foods. Therefore, surveys about traditional foods and dishes are essential to cut down many problems related with the modernized foods and to increase use of locally available food sources. In Sri Lanka, there are many recipe books but they do not give an idea about nutrition composition. The survey was conducted to develop a recipe book by including traditional Sri Lankan food recipes and their nutrition composition. Different food recipes were collected from adult women in different areas (08 districts) by home visits, face to face interviews and through telephone calls. Further, available traditional recipes were collected by reviewing the recipe books and searching internet. The amount of ingredients for solid foods were measured by using household measures and home scale and expressed as grams. Liquid foods were measured by measuring cylinder and household measures and expressed as millilitres. The recipes which were taken from telephone calls were prepared at the University dietetics laboratory. Nutrition compositions of recipes were calculated using the Food Base 2000 software. The developed recipe book consists of 50 recipes of Sri Lankan traditional foods, the method of preparation as well as the nutritional composition. The recipes in the book have been presented under five food categories; cereal based foods, sweets, dishes, mallum and kola kenda / herbal drinks. Thus, the developed recipe book provides different recipes with way of preparation and nutrition composition of them. Therefore, this can be used as an educational tool for menu planning.