Kavum

Kavum is a Sri Lankan sweet made by frying a dough of rice flour and palm treacle. Also called “oil cake” in English, it appears on the table at Sinhala and Tamil New Year. The treacle-laced dough turns a deep color when fried, and the sweetness of the treacle remains inside each small piece of fried dough.

Konda kavum with its raised knob. 2013, Chamal N / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Downscaled version provided by the source; no changes to the content after retrieval.

Forming the Knob with a Skewer While Frying

There are many kinds of kavum. Konda kavum is a type with a knob on top that resembles hair tied up in a topknot, and it is shaped while the dough fries in the pan. In one method, rice that has been soaked overnight and ground into flour is mixed with kithul treacle and salt, and the batter is dropped into the oil one ladleful at a time. Partway through, a skewer is inserted into the center to lift the inner dough, and more batter or hot oil is poured over it to build up the knob. Rather than turning the dough out of a mold, the cook moves the frying dough with a skewer and shapes it while pouring batter and oil over it.

While the skewer is being turned, hot oil is also poured over the surrounding dough. A newspaper journalist who first made kavum with their mother recalls being so preoccupied with pouring the oil that they forgot to turn the skewer. It is a scene from that family’s New Year kitchen, where, under the mother’s guidance, they started by washing and drying the rice and grinding it into flour.

There are also varieties that differ in ingredients and shape, such as mun kavum, which is made with mung beans. Although both are fried rice-flour sweets, kavum is a different sweet from kokis, which has the texture of a thin, mold-shaped piece.

The Sweetness of Kithul and the New Year Platter

Kithul treacle is made by boiling down sap collected from the palm’s flower clusters. Some people climb the trees, attach containers to the flower clusters and collect the dripping sap. Treacle made by reducing the liquid until thick gives kavum a deep sweetness, and when solidified, it also becomes jaggery.

On the New Year table, kavum is arranged on sweet platters together with kokis, milk rice and other dishes, and shared with relatives and neighbors. In one case, a Sri Lankan family entrusted kavum to an acquaintance as a gift for people living in Japan. A memoir depicting a Sri Lankan household describes tasting freshly made kavum and storing the sweets in a large earthenware pot in preparation for the celebrations.

Old Records and Today’s Form

Robert Knox’s account of the island of Ceylon, published in 1681, describes how to make “Caown.” According to his description, rice flour and jaggery are formed into small pieces, pressed with the thumb on a leaf, and then fried in coconut oil or butter. It cannot be said that the fried sweet he recorded had exactly the same shape as today’s knobbed konda kavum, but the account does show that a sweet made by frying rice combined with a sweetener was recorded long ago.

Glossary