Highlights
- A recipe video by Buzzfeed's Tasty called gulab jamun Indian doughnut.
- Indian twitterati reacted by misnaming popular American dishes.
- This isn't the first time a food misnomer has irked Indians on Twitter.
Gulab jamun is one of the most loved Indian sweets and with the popularity of the Indian cuisine on the rise, the sweet has started being served in restaurants around the world. It's a well-known fact that we Indians take a lot of pride in our food and the various versions of them too. Even with fusion food and experimentation in cuisines gaining traction in the subcontinent, the authenticity of the diverse Indian cuisines, is highly valued. So what happens when your favourite sweet dish gets called by a categorically foreign name? Something like that happened when
Buzzfeed's Tasty posted a video recipe of
gulab jamun and called it "Indian fried doughnut."
The video quickly reached the Indian followers of Tasty's Twitter page and elicited a whole lot of reactions, most of which mocked the Anglicisation of the name of the sweet dish. But that wasn't the only thing that bothered Indian Twitterati. They also raised questions over the recipe and the finished product, which didn't quite look like a gulab jamun.
Here are some tweets from the reply thread of the Tasty video:
Some users indicated that Americanising the name of the sweet dish may be a form of cultural appropriation:
There were some political jokes as well:
But there was one tweet that kind of put things in perspective for the angry Indian tweeters:
This is not the first time Indians on Twitter have reacted strongly to food misnomers. Last year veteran actor Shabana Azmi had to bear the brunt of Twitterati's anger, after she mistook poha for upma, while vacationing in Florence. The radical foodie brigade had also pounced upon Chef Gordon Ramsay, after he had 'insulted' south Indian breakfast favourite medu vada, by indicating that it looked like prison food. Is it time we Indians stopped being so sensitive about our food? What's in a name, after all? Moreover, someone else's opinion about our food isn't going to affect our love for it!