Tiffin is an Indian English word for a type of meal. It can refer to the midday luncheon or, in some regions of the Indian subcontinent, a between meal snack , or in South Indian usage, a light breakfast. When used in place of the word "lunch", it does not necessarily mean a light meal.
Video Tiffin
History and etymology
In the British Raj, where the British custom of afternoon tea was supplanted by the Indian practice of taking a light meal at that hour, it came to be called tiffin. It is derived from English colloquial or slang tiffing meaning to take a little drink, and had by 1867 become naturalised among Anglo-Indians in the north of the country to mean luncheon.
Maps Tiffin
Today
In South India and in Nepal, tiffin is generally a snack between meals: dosas, idlis, vadas etc. In other parts of India, such as Mumbai, the word mostly refers to a packed lunch of some sort. In Mumbai, it is often forwarded to them by dabbawalas, sometimes known as tiffin wallahs, who use a complex system to get thousands of tiffin-boxes to their destinations. In Mumbai, a school-going child's lunch box is fondly called a Tiffin box.
Tiffin often consists of rice, lentils, curry, vegetables, chapatis or "spicy meats". In addition, the lunch boxes are themselves called tiffin carriers, tiffin-boxes or just tiffins.
See also
- Bento
- Dosirak
- Tiffin (confectionery)
Notes
References
- Harding, Luke (29 October 2002), "A Bombay lunchbox", The Guardian
- Hughes, Martin; Mookherjee, Sheema; Delacy, Richard (2001), India (illustrated ed.), Lonely Planet, p. 25, ISBN 978-1-86450-328-9
- Murray, Sarah (2008), Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat (illustrated ed.), Macmillan, pp. 85-108, ISBN 978-0-312-42814-3
- OED staff (2013), "tiffin, n.", Oxford English Dictionary (online ed.), Oxford University
- Quinion, [Michael (2 September 2006) [2003], World Wide Words: Tiffin, worldwidewords.org, retrieved March 2015
- Thakker, Pradip (11 November 2005), Bombay's amazing dabbawalas, archived from the original on 9 February 2008
- Wedgwood, H. (1872), A Dictionary of English Etymology (second ed.), p. 682
Source of article : Wikipedia
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