Deshabandu Dr. Publis Silva spent his working life at the Mount Lavinia Hotel, where he rose to become Director of Culinary Affairs and Promotions. He was born at Rathgama, on the southern coast, and joined the hotel in 1956 as a coal carrier. By 1970 he was its main chef.
What gives his work its particular character is what he did after that. From 1980 onwards he turned to the study of traditional village cooking and the local plants it draws on — the kind of knowledge held in rural kitchens rather than in hotel training manuals, and gathered by going and asking. That interest in indigenous ingredients and village method has run through his cooking and his public work ever since.
He has also carried Sri Lankan food abroad, cooking at food festivals in Nepal and Malaysia among other places, where the job is to present the island's cuisine to people encountering it for the first time. A 2013 profile in the Daily FT, written around his seventy-seventh birthday, recorded the launch of three books by him.
This volume is written in English and published by Sarasavi Publishers. It will suit readers who want Sri Lankan cookery from a chef formed inside the island's own culinary tradition rather than from a visiting interpreter of it — cooks at home abroad who are working their way into the food, and readers with a connection to Sri Lanka who want a record of it from someone who spent decades in both a hotel kitchen and the villages beyond it.
- Author: Master Chef Dr. Publis Silva
- Publisher: Sarasavi Publishers
- Published: 2011
- Language: English
- Pages: 292
- ISBN: 9556713964
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