Food and drink

Other dishes include roti canai -pancakes served with lentils and curry.
Martabak-a thick rot-pizza with minced meat, onion and egg.
Nasi bitiyani-rice cooked in ghee, spices and vegetable, served with beef or chicken.
Nasi kandar- Mamak's version of nasi campur.
Daun pisang- a Malay/South Indian thali - curry and rice, with poppadoms and
Chutney all served on a banana leaf.

Through inter-marriage with local Malays a unique culture evolved and with it, a causine that has grown out of a blend of the two. Nyonya food is spicier than Chinese food and it uses pork. Nyonya dishes in Penang have adopted flavours from neighbouring Thailand, whereas Melaka's Nyonya food has Indonesian overtones. In traditional straits Chinese households, great emphasis was placed on presentation Doping of ingredients.

Typical dishes include kapitan-chicken cooked in coconut milk.
Otak otak-minced fish, coconut milk and spices, steamed in a banana leaf.
Laksa-rice noodles in spicy coconut milk and prawn-flavoured gravy blended with
Spices and served with shellfish, chicken, beancurd and belacan.
Asam laksa -the specialized Penang version -rice noodles served in fish gravy with shared cucumber, pineapple, raw onions and mint.

The kadzan from the largest ethnic group in Sabah. Their food tends to use mango and can be on the sour side.

Popular dishes include hinava-marinated rawfish.
Soup manuk on hiing- chicken soup with rice wine.
Tapai-chicken cooked in local rice wine.
pakis- ferns with are fried with mushrooms and belacan. Sometimes ferns are eaten raw with a squeeze of lime (sayur pakis limau).
Soup terjun-jumping soup-salted fish, mango and ginger.
Hinompula a dessert made from tapioca, sugar, coconut and the juice from screwphine leaves

Distinctive fruits
Custard apple (or sugar apple) Scaly
green skin, squeeze the skin to open the fruit and scoop out the flesh with a spoon, Season; June-September
Durian(Durio zibethinus) A large
prickly fruit, with yellow flesh, about the size of a football. infamous for its pungent smell While it is today regarded by many visitors as simply revolting, early
Europeans (16th-18th centuries) raved
about it, possibly because it was similar in taste to Western delicacies of the period. Borri (1744) thought that "God himself had produced that fruit. But by 1880 Burbridge was writing is odour- one scarcely feels justified in using the word perfume-is so potent, so vague, but with also insinuating, that it can scarcely be tolerated inside the house Banned from hotel rooms throughout the region, and beloved by most southeast Asians, It has an alluring taste -some maintain it is an addiction. Durian-flavoured chewing gum, ice cream and jams are all available.

Jackfruit similar in appearance to durian but not so spiky. Yellow flesh,tasting slightly like custard -Season: January-June. southern China.

Mango (Mangifera indica) A rainforest fruit which is now cultivated. Widely available in the west in Southeast Asia there are hundreds of different varieties with subtle variations in flavour. delicious eaten with sticky rice and a sweet sauce. The best mangoes in the region are considered to be those from South Thailand. Season. March-June.

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