Nusa Tenggara and the Dry Monsoon

Nusa Tenggara is the chain of islands that runs east from Bali through Lombok, Sumbawa, Komodo, Flores, Sumba and Timor, lying nearer to Australia than the rainy heart of Java and Sumatra. Its climate is set by the monsoon: a long dry season carried on winds from the south-east and a short wet season, which together shape what the islands grow, what they preserve and how they eat. Eleanor Ford, in Fire Islands, writes of this eastern arc as a part of the archipelago apart from the lush west.

The dry monsoon is the governing fact of the region. Where Java and Sumatra receive rain through most of the year, much of Nusa Tenggara has a rainy season of only a few months and then a long dry spell, so that the landscape turns to savannah and scrub and rice, the staple of the west, gives way in many places to maize, sorghum, root crops and the lontar palm. Wet-rice terraces exist, notably on Lombok and in parts of Flores, but they are the exception, and Ford's account of the east is one of cooks working with what the dry land and the sea provide. The lontar palm, Borassus flabellifer, is among the plants most closely bound to the dry islands, particularly Timor, Rote and Sabu, where its sap is tapped and drunk or boiled down to a dark syrup. The coconut and the sugar palm Arenga pinnata serve the wetter pockets. Maize, tubers and beans are cooked into plain, sustaining dishes, and the food of the dry season rests on preservation: meat and fish are salted, smoked or dried in the sun and kept for the months when little grows. The sea is the second source of the table. Lombok and Sumbawa look on to the Indian Ocean and the Flores Sea, and fish, squid and shellfish are grilled over coals, a method that suits a region where fire is the simplest means of cooking. Ford places the cooking of these islands within the wider eastern tradition of grilled and smoked food, in which the fire and the freshness of the catch matter more than elaborate pastes. Lombok is the best known of the islands at table, its name taken in popular use to mean chilli, and its cooking is hot, built on bird's-eye chilli Capsicum frutescens, shrimp paste and tomato. Flores and Sumba hold older, quieter traditions, and Timor, with its pastoral, meat-eating habits, is closer to the cooking of the eastern archipelago than to Java. The islands are therefore not one cuisine but several, held together by the dry monsoon, a reliance on fire and preservation, and a smaller dependence on rice than the west.

The table of Nusa Tenggara is one of fire, salt and chilli rather than the long-simmered coconut curries of the west. Fish and meat are grilled over coals, served with sharp raw or lightly cooked sambals, and eaten with maize, root crops or rice where it can be grown. On Lombok the heat of the chilli is the defining character, while on the drier islands the taste is of smoke, salt and the sweetness of lontar or sugar palm syrup.