Pandanus pastelarop (Shompen)VegetarianStaple
Boiled and pressed pandanus pulp, eaten fresh or dried into keeping cakes. The traditional starch of the islands, and effectively unknown as a staple anywhere else in India.
Nicobar Islands · Island Realms
Dishes
Named dishes are the wrong unit here. Nicobarese food is a set of preparations rather than a repertoire of titles, and the published record of local dish names — which differ across at least six languages within the group — is thin enough that inventing them would do more harm than leaving them out. What follows is described by what it is, with local terms given only where they are attested.
Roast pigNon-vegetarianFeast
Pig killed, singed and roasted or pit-cooked for a feast — most importantly the mortuary feast, at which the number of animals killed is the measure of the occasion. Pork is feast food and not everyday food.
Smoked fishNon-vegetarianEveryday
Reef and lagoon fish hung above the hearth fire inside the raised house until dry. Because the fire burns most of the day anyway, preservation costs nothing extra.
Fish with coconutNon-vegetarianMain
Fish boiled or cooked with grated coconut and coconut milk, salted, sometimes with chilli. The commonest cooked dish, and the point at which Nicobarese and Andamanese settler cooking most resemble each other.
Nicobari alooVegetarianStaple
A cultivated yam, a form of Dioscorea alata, grown and stored on Car Nicobar and boiled or roasted. It is the subject of a body of documented traditional cultivation knowledge, which is unusual for a tuber crop anywhere in India.
Coconut, at every stage of ripenessVegetarianEveryday
Tender for drinking, soft-fleshed for eating, mature for milk and oil, sprouted for the spongy apple inside. The single most eaten thing in the islands, and the reason the coconut palm is counted, inherited and disputed like land.
Boiled banana and breadfruitVegetarianEveryday
Cooking banana, breadfruit and papaya from village groves, boiled or roasted. The garden crops that fill the gap between pandanus and rice.
Rice from the rationVegetarianStaple
Rice arrives by ship and through the public distribution system, and has become a daily staple over the last several decades. It is worth naming as a dish because its arrival changed the food system more than any single ingredient in the islands' recorded history.
ToddyVegetarianDrink
Coconut sap, drunk fresh or fermented. Present at every gathering and closely tied to feast obligations.
Turtle and dugongNon-vegetarianHistorical
Recorded in the older ethnography as feast and prestige food. Both are now protected species under the Wildlife Protection Act, and this entry is history rather than a menu.
Betel quidVegetarianAfter a meal
Areca and leaf, chewed as widely here as anywhere in island Southeast Asia, and traded between islands alongside pigs and coconuts.
Staples
CoconutPandanus pulpFishYam, banana and breadfruitRice, supplied
Sweets
No developed sweet course is recorded. Sweetness comes from ripe fruit, from coconut and from toddy rather than from a confectionery tradition.
Street food
None. There is no market-street food culture in the Nicobars; food is produced, cooked and shared within the village and the tuhet.
Drinks
Tender coconut waterToddy, fresh and fermentedTea and coffee, introduced
The food of Nicobar Islands — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (11)