Foodways
A kitchen with one crop and one fish. The coconut supplies fat, liquid, sweetness and fuel; the skipjack tuna supplies protein; the rice under both of them comes off a ship from Kochi, as does the wheat flour, the onion, the chilli and most of the spice. Because nothing can be grown to store and nothing could be chilled until recently, the preserving of tuna is not a speciality here but the central technology of the food system, and the smoked loin — masmin — turns up in some form at most meals. Against Malabar, ninety per cent of whose spice vocabulary the islands inherited, the cooking is markedly plainer: less masala, less oil beyond coconut oil, and a flavour built from coconut, salt, smoke, lime and chilli.
Primary cooking medium
Coconut oil, pressed on the islandsFresh coconut milk, taken in two presses — a thick first and a thin secondGrated fresh coconut used as body rather than as a garnish
Dominant sour agents
LimeTamarind, importedKodampuli (Garcinia gummi-gutta), brought in from Malabar rather than grownThe salt-and-smoke tang of masmin itself, which does much of the work sourness does elsewhere
Spice register
Restrained, and deliberately so against the Malabar coast it draws its vocabulary from. Chilli, turmeric, black pepper, a little ginger and garlic, curry leaf where a household keeps a plant alive in a pot. There is no roasted-masala tradition and no fried-onion base; the aromatic signature is coconut plus smoke. Minicoy goes plainer still and closer to Maldivian practice — boiled fish, lime, raw chilli and onion, with the heat added at the table rather than in the pot.
Staple grains and carbs
Rice, entirely imported — no cereal is grown anywhere in the territoryWheat flour, imported, mainly as flatbread and at Minicoy as roshi
Preservation methods
Masmin — the smoked and sun-dried skipjack loin, and the single most important preserved food in the islandsSalting and sun-drying of shark, reef fish and smaller tuna on coral-rubble drying floorsCoconut jaggery boiled down from sweet toddy, which keeps where the toddy does notCopra, dried in the sun and either pressed for oil or shipped out as the islands' only agricultural exportCoconut oil itself as a storage medium for fried fish
Signature techniques
Masmin
Skipjack is gilled and gutted at sea, the loins cut out and boiled in seawater or heavy brine, then racked over a smouldering coconut-husk fire for a day or more and finished in the sun until the loin is hard enough to knock against wood. Roughly half or more of the islands' tuna landing has historically gone this way. The product keeps for months without cold storage, which is precisely why it exists — the fishery is a monsoon fishery in a place with no ice and no road.
Also found in: Maldives, as valhomas and hikimas, Sri Lanka, as Maldive fish
Pole-and-line live-bait fishing
Small planktivorous baitfish are netted in the lagoon at dawn, kept alive in the boat's wells, then thrown by handfuls into a tuna school while a spray of water breaks the surface. The tuna strike anything that moves and are lifted aboard one at a time on barbless hooks. The method came north from the Maldives through Minicoy, and the Fisheries Department introduced it to the rest of the islands only in the late 1960s — one dated, traceable technology transfer that reorganised the entire island economy.
Also found in: Maldives
Two-press coconut milk
Grated coconut is squeezed once without water for the thick first milk and again with warm water for the thin. The thin milk cooks the fish; the thick goes in off the heat at the end, because it splits if it boils. The same discipline runs down the whole Malabar and Kerala coast; the islands apply it to almost every dish they make, because there is no other liquid fat.
Also found in: Malabar, Kochi & Central Kerala, Tulu Nadu
Toddy tapping and jaggery reduction
The unopened spathe of the coconut palm is bound, sliced daily and bled into a pot; the sweet sap is drunk fresh or boiled down to a dark jaggery. Fermented toddy is not part of the picture — Lakshadweep has been under prohibition since 1979, with a long-standing exception for the resort island of Bangaram.
Also found in: Malabar, Kochi & Central Kerala, Canara Coast
Clear tuna broth
Fresh tuna simmered in salted water with little more than curry leaf and onion, the broth spooned over rice and finished at the table with lime and chilli. This is the everyday Minicoy meal and the direct counterpart of Maldivian garudhiya; the northern islands lean instead towards a coconut-milk curry.
Also found in: Maldives