BharatSangraha

Nicobar Islands · Island Realms

Foodways

A Southeast Asian food system attached to India by administration rather than by cooking. The coconut is everything — food, drink, oil, fuel, roofing and the unit in which wealth and obligation are counted. Beside it stands pandanus, whose fruit is boiled and pressed into a paste that functions as a starch staple; this is the only place in India where pandanus is eaten as a staple rather than used as an aroma. Pigs are reared and eaten at feasts rather than routinely, and are held as much for their social use as for their meat. Fish comes off the reef. What is almost absent is the entire Indian spice apparatus — no masala tradition, very little souring, no dairy, and salt, chilli and smoke doing nearly all of the seasoning.

Primary cooking medium

Coconut, in every form — fresh, milk, oilPork fat, at feasts

Dominant sour agents

Lime and wild citrusSouring is not a marked feature of this kitchen — there is no equivalent of tamarind, kokum or kudampuli in everyday use, and saying so is more accurate than supplying one

Spice register

Minimal by any mainland standard. Salt, chilli where it has been adopted, and the smoke of the house hearth. The flavour of Nicobarese food is coconut, pandanus and pig, and the fact that a cuisine inside India has almost no spice vocabulary is the single most useful thing to know about it. Rice, chilli and mainland seasonings have entered through the ration shop and through settler contact, and the everyday kitchen is now a mixture of the two.

Staple grains and carbs

Rice, mostly supplied rather than grownPandanus paste and yam function as the traditional starch staple in place of any grain — Nicobari aloo, a cultivated form of Dioscorea alata, is grown and stored on Car Nicobar

Preservation methods

Pandanus pulp boiled, pressed and dried into cakes that keep for monthsFish smoked on racks above the house hearth, which is inside the raised hut and burning most of the dayCopra dried in the sun, the islands' one export commodityCoconut oil, pressed and storedLive pigs, which are the most durable form of stored wealth on an island with no bank

Signature techniques

Pandanus paste

The fruit of the pandanus is boiled, scraped and pressed to separate the edible pulp from the fibre, then cooked down and dried into cakes or blocks. It stores, it travels, and it is the reason a society with almost no cereal cultivation had a reliable starch. The Shompen of Great Nicobar rely on it particularly heavily and call it larop.

Also found in: Pacific island societies, where the same technique is used on the same plant

Hearth smoking in the raised house

The fire sits inside the elevated hut, and fish and meat hang above it. The smoke cures the food, keeps insects out of the thatch, and preserves the roof — one fire doing three jobs, which is why the hearth is never allowed to go fully out.

Also found in: Naga Hills, Mizo-Kuki-Chin Hills

Plant fish poison

Crushed seeds and fruit of Barringtonia asiatica and related plants are put into a reef pool or a walled section of shallow water; the saponins stun fish, which are then collected by hand. It is documented in the ethnobotanical literature on the Nicobarese, it works only on enclosed water, and it is an old technique across island Southeast Asia.

Also found in: Naga Hills, Bastar, Island Southeast Asia

Pig rearing for feast

Pigs are raised in and around the village, owned by the tuhet rather than by a person, and killed for feasts — most importantly the mortuary feast. Their number is a public record of a family's standing, so the herd is a ledger as much as a food supply.

Also found in: Naga Hills, Khasi & Jaintia Hills, Siang & the Adi Country

Coconut oil pressing

Kernel dried to copra and pressed for oil, which is used for cooking, for the body and for light. The territory's virgin coconut oil, made in the Nicobarese manner and called Tavi-i-Ngaich, was registered as a geographical indication in December 2024.

Also found in: Lakshadweep, Malabar, Andaman Islands

Toddy tapping

The coconut spathe is bled for sap, drunk fresh or allowed to ferment. Toddy has a social function here as well as a nutritional one and appears at every gathering.

Also found in: Andaman Islands, Malabar, Tulu Nadu

The foodway signature of Nicobar Islands — cooking medium, souring agents, spice register, staple grains and the techniques that define it. (6)