September 2024
Kellogs cornflakes were my first exposure to non-Sri Lankan food. (I don’t count the food on board the Oriana, the ship in which we travelled to Australia, as it was something of an intermediate time for me, neither in Sri Lanka nor Australia, and so intermediate food also.) It was the morning after we arrived in Sydney, 11 November 1962. We were given some groceries to tide us over till my dad began work a week after we landed, and the family had an income. There were probably other things but it’s the cornflakes that stand out for me. My family are Burghers, descendants of the Dutch and Portuguese who had settlements in Sri Lanka pre Britain’s colonisation. So, our meals were a mix of Sri Lankan, Portuguese, Dutch and colonial English food. Breakfast during the week was usually porridge with warm milk, scrambled eggs on toast on the weekend or hoppers (bowl shaped pancakes) with fish curry and sometimes manioc with green gram, grated coconut and onion sambol. There was something exciting about this novel Australian breakfast food; crisp orange flakes, reminiscent of broken pappadum, going soggy in a bowl of cold milk sweetened with sugar. Maybe it was the decisiveness of the break from Sri Lanka that the cornflakes embodied.
