Everyday eating for a young British Asian family

[nomadicwriter]

My main character is an eleven-year-old boy living in modern-day England; his parents are second generation Brits of Punjabi Hindu family background. I'm just trying to get a rough idea of what sort of thing they might eat at home, in terms of family meals, what kind of snacks they'd have in the house, what he might be given in his packed lunches

Comments

[cattraine]

My college roommates were Hindu raised in the UK and they ate a lot of curries, dal and fish and chips. For snacks the usual cakes, biscuits and candy purchased at the stores.

[nomadicwriter]

Thanks!

[tzgmaeel]

My college roommates wereChinese

[thekumquat]

Where in England? The availability of Asian sweets and snacks in shops is pretty limited to certain areas of cities.
Hindu school friends and now colleague's children tended to have sandwiches etc like everyone else in their packed lunch, but then curry of a few types for dinner at home. One colleague used to get up at 5am each day to prepare for the evening meal before work, making 3 different vegetarian dishes, and claimed this was normal for her culture. Her teenage son certainly didn't appreciate the effort!

[syrenstar]

IA where I live now Asian food is stocked side by side the English stuff and in the corner shops tinned/frozen food is prominently Asian but when I lived closer to the city centre I saw only some crisp brands or dedicated aisle in the supermarkets.

Availability would affect what the family have at home.

[nomadicwriter]

Oops, sorry: I meant to specify this is a fictional small/medium-sized town rather than London or any of the other cities with a large local Asian population.

Thanks!

[sollersuk]

The reference to "Punjabi Hindu" startled me as like most Brits I automatically thought in terms of the Pakistani Punjab; if his family were from there, they would be members of a religious minority. I don't think there is a significant number of immigrants from the Indian Punjab; if there is, they certainly don't conspicuously identify themselves as such. Certainly the immediate reaction in most people's mind to "Punjabi" would be "Muslim".

To be utterly candid, I didn't even know the Indian Punjab existed until I looked "Punjab" up just now.

[thekumquat]

All this - while I knew part of the Punjab was in India, there certainly aren't enough immigrants from it to identify as such, unless you're in one of very few areas where there are significant numbers of Indians, basically West London and Leicester. In the rest of the country there are very few Hindus or Indians, generally educated immigrants - few enough that my immediate response to the OP was "why is the character Hindu", let alone Punjabi, and wonderig if they are.confused and the character should be Muslim, or if it's fic based on a character I've never heard of.

[fjm]

Not true.

There are very large numbers of Indians in the north of England in the mill towns. My mother worked in Preston where the tension between Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities was high.

Where I lived in Reading the Asian population was mostly Sikh and Hindu with one small mosque.

[bopeepsheep]

31% of the population of Indian Punjab is Hindu - I wouldn't consider that a significantly low number in a country with only two common religions, never mind three or more.

I might wonder initially if someone identifying as Punjabi was Sikh, because that's been my experience locally - four of my colleagues in a 12person office were girls from that background, for instance - but I wouldn't be particularly surprised to find that they were Hindu or Jain or something else either.

[phoenixnoor]

As a Brit Asian (Punjabi Muslim) my mum used to sometimes make us kebab sandwiches for school trips out, otherwise I used to have school dinners. When I cottoned onto the fact it wasn't "normal" I asked for (normal boring tasteless) tuna sarnies instead.

At home, after school we had a cup of tea, with biscuits maybe. Breakfast was the usual. But towards the evening it was a traditional Asian dinner - the staple is a roti (a sort of naan bread) with a curry, so maybe a chicken curry or vegetable curry. Rice, sometimes.

Snacks - sometimes my mum used to make pakoras, samosas as snacks on a weekend. Always used to have a stash of crisps and chocolate too though my dad used to have his own version of Pakistani sugar sweets (mithai) in the cupboard too.

If it was a special day, birthday for example, we used to have special food which would be roast chicken, rice, naan, curry, various puddings and desserts, a sort of fried roti (paratha), side dishes which was basically anything fried, chickpea salad (chana chaat) and even now, most of the

[nomadicwriter]

Thanks, this is really useful.