'This is Blasphemy': South Indian Couple Paired Tunday Kebabs With Rice and the Internet is Horrified

On social media, people fight about a lot of things. It’s all the more evident when it comes to food, especially local cuisine.

There is a flood of people who get passionate about their own cuisine, which is a culmination of the unique taste and flavours of each region. They can go to any lengths to prove a point. So, it was no surprise that recently on Twitter there was a huge food debate when a South India couple paired Lucknowi Tunday Kebabs with Plain Rice.

It all started when SpuddyKat (@spadjay), a product manager, tweeted: “My Lucknowi in-laws sweetly sent Tunday kebab paste for my south Indian parents. My parents excitedly fried up the kebabs and ate them with... plain rice and poriyal. My spouse is horrified. (sic)”

Those who are not aware, Tunday Kebab paste is half-cooked kebabs in the form of a paste. Her tweet collected 1.3k ‘likes’ and was retweeted 78 times, including 32 ‘quote retweets’.

However, this combination didn’t go down too well with many people, which result in an intense debate on the social media platform.

Replying to SpuddyKat’s tweet, Saugato Datta (@sd268) tweeted: “I was initially horrified and then thought of the time my Bengali aunt was given some caviar from Ukraine and fried them up with some batter, green chilies etc and served with rice and dal - as we usually do to fish roe from Rohu or Hilsa. (sic)” In another tweet, he added that it had gone down in family lore.

Few Twitteratis also got their hackles up, with their Tweets reflecting how the showdown was grounded in cultural differences.

While @_A_kasH tweeted about getting “panic attacks”, @amrikgandhi09 compared it to “eating Makke di roti with Sambhar (sic)”.

Kaavyya Kesarwani (@kaavyya), a “Lucknavi”, too, didn’t shy away from tweeting how “unsettling” it was for her to visualize people pairing her beloved Tunday Kebab with rice.

But a few Twitter users like @doc_sund didn’t think it was shocking, because he had seen it happen before. “My dad ate dal makhni with kal dosai the other day. So these things don't shock Tamilians (sic)”, he tweeted.

Replying to @spadjay, another Twitterati, @AntonyRJulian1, reminisced about a time when he had seen “a white guest at an Indian wedding put Thayir Sadam inside Dosai (instead of Potato masala), rolling it up and eating it like a burrito... (sic)”

Whichever side of the debate you are on, there’s no denying that food partisans will always be armed with culinary hand grenades, and won’t think before hurling those even at the slightest provocation.