In Sri Lanka, April arrives with Avurudu or Puthandu, the Sinhala and Tamil New Year — a time of joy deeply rooted in tradition. The April New Year is a harvest festival, when families come together to celebrate the season's bounty, following centuries-old rituals and customs. Food is at the heart of it. Across the island, meals are prepared at an auspicious time, aligning with astrological timings that mark the Sun God’s transition from the old year to the new. The traditional New Year feast features celebratory dishes like kiribath (rice cooked in coconut milk), along with sweetmeats such as kevum, kokis, and aasmi. Depending on the region, other dishes also appear — often made with hyperlocal ingredients like jackfruit, which is ubiquitous during the season.

Jackfruit is now a vegan superfood in the West, but for decades, it helped Sri Lankans avoid starvation and promote food security across the island. It’s so deeply woven into the Sri Lankan diet that every part of the fruit is used in our cooking. So this season at Kolamba, we are bringing the island’s ingenuity to the heart of London, celebrating the ingredients that shaped our childhoods and community feasts. 

The many uses of jackfruit

At home in Sri Lanka, the Sinhala and Tamil New Year marks a new beginning; a time of renewal, prosperity and abundance. It also falls within the first harvest of the year where farmers reap the paddy and trees flower and flourish. It’s also a time when jackfruit is in abundance. A common fruit across many home gardens in the island, a grown tree can keep an entire family fed during the season. As the New Year is all about sharing, you’ll also see families sharing their jackfruit yield with the neighbours, friends and relatives. 

Jackfruit is versatile as it’s cooked into different dishes. Young baby jackfruit is cut into chunks and slow-cooked for hours in a clay pot with spices and herbs like cloves and curry leaves, simmering in coconut milk to prepare a delicious, aromatic curry that is both hearty and comforting. Shredded jackfruit is stir-fried with mustard seeds, curry leaves, and freshly grated coconut for kos mallung. 

Concepts like zero waste cooking is not just a fad but a way of life for Sri Lankans. No part of the fruit, therefore, goes to waste. While the bright yellow flesh of ripe jackfruit is excellent in taste – especially with a sprinkle of salt – jackfruit seeds are sun-dried and roasted for snacks. They are also made into a curry with coconut milk, or ground into flour to prepare kos ata aggala, sweet teatime treats. Thinly sliced jackfruit is deep-fried for savoury snacks. 

Jackfruit seeds also feature in traditional recipes of hathmaluwa, a seven vegetable dish prepared during the day of New Year in the forested villages of Sri Lanka. A vegan dish rich in flavour and nutrients, its history runs back over 2000 years. 

In the modern context, young chefs and urban restaurants in Sri Lanka also honour these cherished traditions by incorporating jackfruit-based dishes. Pulled jackfruit, which has a texture similar to pork or lamb, is often made into a burger patty for vegan burgers while women-run kitchens across the island prepare jackfruit into a deep-fried breaded cutlet. 

Introducing jackfruit at Kolamba

At our Sri Lankan restaurant in Soho, we are introducing this versatile fruit to our menu with jackfruit mallum, a delicious vegan dish to pair with rice or your favourite carbs. While most Sri Lankan families have their own versions of the recipe, a common way to make this dish is to incorporate both jackfruit seeds and pods of the raw fruit, which are boiled until soft. Then it’s mixed with a spicy paste made of scraped coconut, garlic, curry leaves and green chilli. Traditionally, the paste is made using a miris gala, an ancient Sri Lankan stone grinder. Spices and scraped coconut are placed on a slab of granite and are ground into a paste by dragging a heavy cylindrical stone over them. While many urban homes now retreat to a modern grinder, the manual miris gala helps balance the flavour, nutrients and texture of the ingredients. 

Jackfruit mallum pairs well with any type of Sri Lankan curry, vegan, vegetarian or meat-based. Have it for lunch with rice, and mix together other curries like coconut-based dal or a flavourful chicken curry. 

 For Sri Lankans living far away from home, festivals like the Sinhala and Tamil New Year arrive with a sense of nostalgia for home cooked food, the sound of koha (Asian koel) who sings at spring, and the flowering trees that line the highways and byways of our tropical home. Food bridges that distance, which is also why we are bringing some of those familiar flavours to London; the dishes we cooked at home; the generational culinary traditions our mothers and fathers cherished; and the abundance of a monsoon-fed island where the sun shines every day of the year. 

At Soho, we are also featuring other hyperlocal Sri Lankan ingredients like banana blossom, making them into a spicy patty. So join us this season, share a meal and know more about the cooking traditions of Sri Lanka, even when you are thousands of miles away.