Welcome to the country where potbellies are sought after as are burps. Leave all your table manners behind lest one offends one’s host by not licking one’s fingers or rubbing one’s stomach in the course of a meal. After every meal, you must feel slightly dizzy and definitely unstable on your feet. If you don’t, you have not eaten enough. Food is important. The more one eats, the plumper one gets and therefore, the fattest is often considered the most prosperous.
To enjoy the perfect Indian meal, one needs to be patient. Eating is important. It is less about the stomach and all about the palate. A typical Indian meal requires an adventurous consumer. One has to un-learn all one knows about food before biting into a ‘thali’. A thali (a large steel or silver or brass palate) serves a complete meal.
A good meal starts with sitting cross-legged, calm, relaxed and definitely starved. Each dish is served separately and second helpings are mandatory. The texture of food is almost as important as the taste, so one must eat with one’s fingers. Thankfully, washing hands before a meal is not considered a sign of disrespect! Rice requires to be mashed with either the lentils or the vegetables or both. As the grains of rice escapes from the gaps of one’s fingers, slowly changing colour on its way to being perfectly mixed, one can almost anticipate how great it’s going to be before it touches the tongue.
By the end of a typical Indian meal one generally fells full. By that I mean the kind of feeling which makes one swear never eat again. The licking of the fingers after scraping every last morsel from the plate soon follows. The finger having been licked, everyone nods their heads sagaciously and comments on what a good meal it’s been and how they’ll probably skip the next one since this needs time to be digested. A chorus of burps usually signals the end to such a meal. There are tones to the burping and the longest probably grossest one sets apart the most satisfied consumer.
So let go of your inhibitions. Dog into the unknown culinary experience that is India. Leave behind so-called sophistication. Overeat till you make yourselves sick. But do not forget to burp.
To enjoy the perfect Indian meal, one needs to be patient. Eating is important. It is less about the stomach and all about the palate. A typical Indian meal requires an adventurous consumer. One has to un-learn all one knows about food before biting into a ‘thali’. A thali (a large steel or silver or brass palate) serves a complete meal.
A good meal starts with sitting cross-legged, calm, relaxed and definitely starved. Each dish is served separately and second helpings are mandatory. The texture of food is almost as important as the taste, so one must eat with one’s fingers. Thankfully, washing hands before a meal is not considered a sign of disrespect! Rice requires to be mashed with either the lentils or the vegetables or both. As the grains of rice escapes from the gaps of one’s fingers, slowly changing colour on its way to being perfectly mixed, one can almost anticipate how great it’s going to be before it touches the tongue.
By the end of a typical Indian meal one generally fells full. By that I mean the kind of feeling which makes one swear never eat again. The licking of the fingers after scraping every last morsel from the plate soon follows. The finger having been licked, everyone nods their heads sagaciously and comments on what a good meal it’s been and how they’ll probably skip the next one since this needs time to be digested. A chorus of burps usually signals the end to such a meal. There are tones to the burping and the longest probably grossest one sets apart the most satisfied consumer.
So let go of your inhibitions. Dog into the unknown culinary experience that is India. Leave behind so-called sophistication. Overeat till you make yourselves sick. But do not forget to burp.
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