Burgher Legacy · Rice Parcel
Lamprais
Photo: AntanO / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Its name comes from a Dutch word for a packet or lump of rice — yet the dish itself isn't Dutch at all, it's the Burghers' own reinvention of a Javanese rice parcel (lemper) that the Dutch East India Company brought over.
Rice cooked in meat stock is packed with a mix of curries, a frikkadel (meatball), and seeni sambol, wrapped tightly in a banana leaf and baked until the leaf chars. It's sold whole by weight at bakeries and eateries along Negombo's Catholic, colonial-legacy streets.
Why it's made this way: Negombo's large Dutch Burgher community, descended from generations of Dutch, Portuguese and Sri Lankan intermarriage, kept the dish as a Sunday tradition, and the coastal town's colonial-era churches still carry that legacy today.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries.
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