February, hardly anyone’s favourite month, is a particularly trying one for me. In addition to the biting cold, the greyness and the infernal wind whipping up from Lake Ontario, I have to contend with my birthday. And as the day approaches, the “immigrant blues” begin. One more year passed in this cold country, one more year in which I have become an even greater stranger to Sri Lanka. The old anxious questioning around identity starts up again. If I’m not Sri Lankan, what am I? About five years ago, I stumbled on an antidote to this angst. I began to throw myself a birthday party. I cook up a Sri Lankan spread, invite my family and a few childhood friends to lunch and, in the midst of the good food, the laughter and the memories, my homesickness dissipates.

Last year, my blues came on stronger than usual. Believing, foolishly, that the remedy was to set an even greater cooking challenge, I decided to make the ultimate Sri Lankan feast, lamprais: a mound of rice surrounded by various curries, all wrapped in a banana leaf and then baked.

I had never made the dish before, but I remembered well, from my childhood, the commotion in the kitchen, the cooking feat that took two days (lamprais were always made in our home for a big party). In the days before the event, large crates of dry goods and spices would arrive from our grocer; a special order would be placed at the butcher’s, as the impossibly complicated lamprais curry requires four meats. Extra help would be hired, and though we children were forbidden to enter the kitchen, we could not help sneaking in for a glance at the rare sight of our mother and her sister, Aunty Bunny, labouring alongside the servants as they chopped mounds of garlic, ginger and onion, and minced fish in the meat grinder for the spiced fried fish balls we called frikkadels. A table, brought in from the servants’ quarters, was piled with Chinese eggplants for the brinjal pahi and ash plantains for a curry with a turmeric and coconut milk sauce.

As the weather outside grew fiercely cold, I curled up next to the radiator and dreamt of lamprais. I remembered the cere­mony of it: the procession of lamprais packets being brought to the table fresh from the oven, that marvellous smell of baked banana leaf. Then there was that magic moment when I would peel back the leaf, releasing a rush of delicious vapours, the roasted spices and tama­rind mingling with the chicken, beef, pork and mutton of the main lamprais curry, the sweet tang of the pickled brinjals, the caramelized onions of the seeni sambal, the sea smell of the prawn blachang.

I decided that if I was going to go to such trouble to make this dish, I would track down the authentic recipe, the one from my childhood. Naively, I consulted the Internet and discovered a maelstrom—a vicious, bitchy debate around what was authentic. I had thought that the dish I enjoyed as a child was the real one. Evidently, I was wrong. People complained about bastardized recipes that include eggplant. Others said that ash plantain was blasphemy. Fish frikkadels were not genuine, either; it was ground beef that was essential. People ridiculed vegetarian and fish lamprais. Particular contempt was reserved for the inclusion of boiled egg—something I was particularly fond of. I also learned, much to my surprise, that the dish wasn’t even tradi­tionally Sri Lankan; it had actually been imported in the 17th century by the Dutch colonizers by way of Indonesia. In fact, most of the Internet postings came from the descendants of these Dutch Burghers, who emigrated to Australia, Canada and England in large numbers in the late ’50s. The only thing they could agree on was that you could not find authentic lamprais in Sri Lanka anymore—that the real thing was only available in the Burgher diaspora. Various Burghers offered what they swore was the authentic recipe, handed down from mothers and grandmothers. None of them matched the others.

Bewildered by all the contradictory accounts, I decided to ask my Aunty Bunny. In her 80s, she has the gentility and formality of an older generation. In company, she appears a mild, rather shy old lady, who speaks softly and sits in a corner, often seeming to nod off. But under her mild demeanour lies a startling wit and a phenomenal memory—she can evoke entire scenes from her childhood. If anyone could help me with my quest, it was her.

Aunty Bunny nodded sympathetically when I told her about my search. “Yes, child, it’s true. Most lamprais these days,” she waved her hand, “mere rice packets. Why, do you recall those lamprais we got catered for your mother’s birthday some years ago? There was coconut sambal in it!” She gasped at the sacrilege. “Now that was truly an insult to lamprais.”