Beets with Tropical Flavors

Beets are a common Sri Lankan vegetable, which always catches us a little by surprise. They seem like such hearty, cold-weather root vegetables, unlikely candidates for the cuisine of a tropical island in the Indian Ocean. But the mountains are high, more than five thousand feet, and in the towns in the center of the island, like Nuwara Eliya, temperatures can get cool. We assume beets were brought by the European colonizers—the Dutch or the British seem the most likely candidates—but we do