Seeni Sambol is a Sri Lankan side dish, served as an accompaniment to rice, curries and hoppers as per the photo below.   It is an integral component of lampries, which despite Covid-19, mum and I made this year at Easter, as per our normal habit.  I made the seeni sambol this year, something we never really do as it takes so many onions!  I used 8 onions to make mine and in the end, there was not enough for all our lampries and we ended up having to use a shop-bought version as well!

Please don’t judge my hoppers, I am playing with a recipe which I will post on here as soon as I have it right!  The main ingredient of Seeni Sambol is onions.  Put very simply you caramelise them down add some spices and voila – there you have it.

Our 2020 lampries.  This is a SriLankan meal consisting of ghee rice, lampries curry, eggplant pickle,seeni sambol, prawn blachan and frikadeller which mum and I cook annually.  We make enough to last the year, packing individual servings into foil packets and putting them into the freezer to reheat and eat whenever the mood takes us!

What I am trying to say is, that I know a bit about Seeni Sambol.  So, when I saw that there was a recipe for it in the Good Housekeeping World Cookery Book, 1972 I was intrigued.  My gut feel is that books this old do not do justice to “ethnic” recipes.  But for the sake of the blog, I was willing to give this one a go.

But, because WordPress loves a subheading,  let’s break it down a little.

The Title

The actual title is fine.  In that, all words are spelt correctly.

It’s the subtitle that made me pause.

And call my mum.

“Are you meant to just eat Seeni Sambol with prawns?”

“No.  Why?”

“No reason”.

So fail on the title.  Seeni Sambol actually means sugar sambol and relates to the sweetness of the caramelised onions and the sugar you add towards the end of cooking to balance out the flavours.  No prawns at all.  Whatsoever.

The Ingredients

There are two very non-traditional additions in these ingredients.  Tomatoes play no part in seeni sambol and neither does milk.

You probably could not have got fresh milk in Sri Lanka in 1972 – it would have either been evaporated or coconut milk.  Either way, I inadvertently left the milk out of my version.  I added the tomatoes though.

There is also an ingredient that is used in a traditional Seeni sambol called a Maldive Fish which is a cured dried fish which adds protein and umami flavours to the Seeni Sambol  If you want to make this, and you cannot find Maldive fish, you can substitute Asian fish sauce.   Or you can leave it out altogether which is what they do in vegetarian versions.

Overall though, the ingredients are pretty close to home.  Just forget the tomatoes and the milk if you want to keep it real!

Oh, and btw?  No prawns.

The Method

So, it all seems legit until…WTF why are they talking about Prawns? There were no prawns in the ingredients so why are there prawns in the GD recipe???

There are no prawns in Seeni Sambol.  And that’s not just me saying that.  That comes direct from my mum.  And I may be an idiot who knows nothing but she knows Sri Lankan cooking!

So, this is kind of a shambolic recipe.  However, if you ignore the magical prawns that do a disappearing act in the ingredients and reappear in the method and the milk which has no place here what so ever. this is not a bad recipe. I didn’t even mind the tomatoes in the final dish!

Here is the full recipe:

And here is a better one from chef Manu Fieldel.  This is a vegetarian version so does not contain the possibly hard to find Maldive Fish.

Hope you are having a good week!  Stay safe friends…the light at the end of this tunnel seems to be appearing!