WHAT IS A HOPPER?

Hoppers are one of Sri Lanka's most-loved dishes, a bowl-shaped pancake of fermented rice-flour batter that turns up on tables from morning to night. The English name is a colonial-era twist on the local word: Sri Lankans call them appam or appa, and hopper is the anglicised version the British landed on. Appa, in turn, traces back to the Tamil appam, roughly, 'cake of flour.'

The dish belongs to a wider family that stretches across the Palk Strait. Hoppers are widely believed to have evolved from the South Indian appam, carried across the Indian Ocean by traders and travellers and gradually adapted with local ingredients, coconut milk above all, which gave the Sri Lankan version its creaminess and fragrance. In Northern and Eastern parts of Sri Lanka it's traditionally fermented with palm toddy rather than yeast, similar to the process used in Kerala. The dish's ultimate origin is genuinely debated among food writers, which feels fitting for something this widely shared and this well-loved.

What isn't in doubt is its place on Sri Lanka’s meal tables. The egg hopper, a crisp little bowl with an egg set into its centre, is a morning staple in households across the country, and wherever you are in Sri Lanka, you're rarely far from a roadside kade where a cook is turning them out one after another.

They come in different forms, plain, egg, milk, and pani, where sweet treacle is mixed with the batter to make the sweet version. The string hopper, a different thing entirely, made from pressed rice-flour strands and steamed, rather than this poured batter. Traditionally they're eaten by hand, torn and dipped, alongside a seeni sambol or coconut sambol, a dhal, or a curry, the everyday centrepiece of a Sri Lankan meal.

This mix makes the classic hopper batter, the crisp-edged, soft-centred bowl that started it all