Lakshadweep · Island Realms
Two registers. The northern and central islands cook a stripped-down Malabar — coconut milk curries, rice, fried fish, dried-tuna relishes — with the meat and the vegetables that a Malabar kitchen would use simply absent. Minicoy cooks Maldivian: boiled fish, wheat flatbread, coconut-and-tuna mixtures eaten at breakfast. Both are eaten with the right hand off a communal dish in older households, and both are structured around whether the boats went out that morning.
Masmin pounded or flaked and worked with grated coconut, onion, green chilli, turmeric and lime. It is the standard accompaniment to rice, it needs no cooking, and it is what a household eats when the sea has been closed for a week.
The Minicoy breakfast — smoked tuna shredded fine with grated coconut, onion, chilli and lime, eaten with a wheat roshi. The same dish, under the same name, is breakfast across the Maldives.
Fresh skipjack boiled in salted water, the broth poured over rice and sharpened at the table with lime, chilli and raw onion. Plain by design; the fish is hours old and is not asked to taste of anything else.
Skipjack or yellowfin cooked in thin coconut milk with chilli, turmeric, ginger and kodampuli, finished with thick milk off the heat. The northern islands' answer to the Minicoy broth, and the point at which the Malabar kitchen is most audible.
Reef octopus, caught by hand at low tide on the lagoon flat, cleaned, tenderised by beating, then fried hard with garlic, green chilli and pepper. Octopus is a lagoon food rather than a boat food, which is why it belongs to the household and not to the fishery.
Tuna worked with onion, tomato and spice into a thick fried or pan-set cake. The word is the Arabic-Persian kebab as it arrived by sea rather than overland.
A thin rice-flour and egg pancake rolled around a filling of coconut and jaggery. The islands' best-known sweet and the one that turns up at every Eid table.
A steamed rice-flour cake built up in layers, made with coconut milk and jaggery. Steaming rather than baking is the rule here for the same reason it is on the Malabar coast — the household has a pot, not an oven.
Chickpea and egg cooked with coconut, sometimes with almonds and raisins from the shipped stores. One of the very few island dishes with no fish in it, which is what makes it worth naming.
Emperor, snapper, trevally and parrotfish taken from the lagoon and reef edge, rubbed with chilli, turmeric and salt and shallow-fried in coconut oil. The reef catch feeds the household; the tuna catch is the cash crop.
A soft unleavened wheat flatbread, cooked on a griddle and eaten with mas huni. Wheat is entirely imported, so this is a bread of the shipping schedule rather than of any field.
Rice, coconut and palm jaggery in various steamed and boiled combinations, made for Eid and for weddings. At Minicoy these sit closer to the Maldivian sweet repertoire than to the Kerala one; the published record of their local names is thin.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Lakshadweep — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (12)