- How to Eat Like a Sri Lankan
- Have some tea. at the very least once every other day.
- Rice should be eaten. A good deal of it.
- Spicy cuisine
- Consume food quickly
- Encourage increased food consumption
- Put your knives, forks, and spoons away. When you eat, use your hands.
How to Eat Like a Sri Lankan
My first exposure to people eating with their bare hands was in Sri Lanka, more specifically in a little roadside café. When I was younger, I used to watch a lot of Hollywood and Bollywood movies, and one of my favourite scenes was when Mithun Chakraborty would be fighting a dozen bad guys at once and then break out into a dance. Nevertheless, nothing appeared more peculiar than seeing him consume food directly from his mother’s hands. I was able to better prepare for my trip after learning that eating with one’s hands is a cultural norm not only in India but also in Sri Lanka. At the end of the day, what occurs in real life is very different from what is seen on film. Even now, my friends find it funny to poke fun at me because of the wide range of feelings that I was able to convey on my face at the time.
The lesson that can be drawn from this story is that it is vitally important to gain an understanding not just of the foods that people in other countries consume but also of the preparation methods used for those foods. When I talk about my favourite utensils, I’m not just referring to my hands, chopsticks, or forks. I’m referring to all of the minutiae that go into determining how a culture views its connection to food. Check out the information on this page to discover more about the cuisine of Sri Lanka. But if you want to know how to eat like someone from Sri Lanka, let’s get started with that right now!
Have some tea. at the very least once every other day.
If you’re from Sri Lanka, you know what’s waiting for you in the morning: a hot cup of Ceylon tea. This first cup is offered separately from the breakfast that is being provided. You consume it as soon as you open your eyes, before your thoughts begin to meander as you try to decide what to have for breakfast before your mind starts to wander. Your body and mind will become alert as a result, and the day will get off to a good start.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, you will be brought your second cup of tea. This cup is as painful as a punch to the face since it has seven spoonfuls of sugar and milk combined in it. If you had been dozing off at your desk, you will now meet all of your deadlines, do the tasks that you have been putting off for months, and provide assistance to all of your coworkers, even if they don’t require it. If you had been dozing off, you were slowly drifting off.
If you are from Sri Lanka, you probably won’t be surprised if the company has a tea maker and server on staff who prepares and serves tea twice a day and knows exactly how to brew your preferred recipe. If you are from another country, you could be surprised; however, if the company does not have such a person,
Rice should be eaten. A good deal of it.
If you’re from Sri Lanka and you don’t eat rice and curry at least once a day, you’re either 1) on a diet, 2) experimenting with your body in some way, or 3) your mom is on vacation and you can’t switch on the rice cooker because you don’t have the remote control. In either event, you are putting yourself in jeopardy of dying from starvation because omitting rice and curry is the equivalent of not eating at all. This is true regardless of whether you consume a hamburger and fries for dinner, a portion of bread for breakfast, or pasta for lunch.
When rice is offered, there are typically three or four different kinds of curry to choose from. You should ensure that there is a substantial mound of rice on your plate, as this will make it more difficult to transport to the table.Bring a lunch that you made yourself. Put it in the middle of a pile of newspapers.
People of Sri Lankan descent never have any trouble deciding what they want to eat for lunch or where they want to get it to eat it. To be quite frank, the issue is not with you but rather with your mother. Do you still remember your very first cup of tea? The average time for a mother in Sri Lanka to enjoy her first cup of tea of the day is around five in the morning, just before she begins preparing food for her family. When you get up in the small hours of the morning to cut veggies, fry papadam, and shred a coconut, your partner and your children are sound asleep. What exactly is going on with moms in the Western world? Is it possible to carry an apple, a sandwich, and a cookie in a single zip-lock bag at the same time? There is diversity among Sri Lanka’s maternal population.
By the way, can you tell me what a zip-lock bag is? Excessively intricate. If you’re from Sri Lanka, before you sandwich your rice and curry between two pieces of old newspaper to keep them warm, you first wrap your rice and curry in a sheet of plastic and then wrap the plastic sheet in two layers of newspaper. If there is any sauce left over, place it in a plastic bag, secure the bag with a tie, and then fill the bag with rice and newspaper.
Spicy cuisine
It is impossible to have an excessive amount of heat if you are a Sri Lankan; in fact, “tasty” is synonymous with “spicy.” When you see the rice and curry dishes that your mother has brought for lunch, you will, of course, start crying. However, additional chile flavour improves not only curries but also other dishes as well. Snacks that are made with slices of mango and pineapple, along with chilli powder, are quite tasty. An omelette with a kick contains all of the ingredients necessary to make a delectable meal. The addition of chilli flakes to a Margherita pizza elevates the flavour to an even higher level.
Consume food quickly
Even when they have visitors over, people from Sri Lanka do not typically spend long periods of time seated at the dinner table eating, drinking, and conversing for long periods of time. Instead, a series of events takes place in a specific order over the course of time.
The first thing that comes to mind is that you and the people you care about are relaxing in the living room with a refreshing drink like cordial or tea. Even though Sri Lanka is a tropical country filled with an abundance of fresh fruit, the cordial that you supply has an artificial flavour. If I’m being completely honest, I just don’t understand why somebody would choose to drink cordial when there are perfectly good fresh papayas and mangos sitting outside their window. In this area, you are free to relax, take pleasure in the present moment, and carry on conversation.
The following course is dinner, and the time allotted for it is equivalent to the length of time required to consume a dish of rice and curry in the dining room. In particular, no longer than twenty minutes at the most. Following that, there are in-depth conversations about politics and other current events while drinking. With the exception of two things: whisky and arrack. Taking It for Granted That You Are the Only Male
If you are a man living in Sri Lanka, the chances are that arrack or whisky is your favourite alcoholic beverage. By the way, regardless of the reason, it was either black label or red label whisky that was being served. A natural selection is arrack, which is produced by fermenting the sap of coconut flowers. Despite the fact that it is more difficult to define, a black label is a type of beverage that is served at all of the parties and get-togethers that are held.
In Sri Lanka, it is against the unwritten law for women to drink in the company of male companions. Imagine that you and your wife are enjoying a cup of coffee together in the living room. To tell you the truth, city women in their thirties and twenties adore their cocktails, but not while their families are there.
Encourage increased food consumption
Within their own home, a Sri Lankan would never allow someone to go hungry. Keep an eye out for these signals that indicate you are performing all of the necessary actions correctly: sweating, undoing the button on your jeans, and taking deep breaths are all signs that you are succeeding. Don’t be fooled into thinking that your guests are so full that they can’t move because you let them eat too much. In response, she instructed me to “Just eat some more, will you?”
Put your knives, forks, and spoons away. When you eat, use your hands.
Because this is the only way to blend the flavours, you, as a native of Sri Lanka, are aware that improving the flavour of rice and curry by mixing them with your hands is the only way to do so. Both the flavour and the consistency change depending on whether you use a spoon or a fork. Be careful not to let food fall between your fingers any further than their tips. I can say with great pleasure that after living in Sri Lanka for three years, not only did I comprehend the reasoning behind why people there eat with their hands, but I also started doing it myself.