Nonya FooD
       
         Nonya cuisine tends to be spicy hot, and uses liberal doses of pungent roots such as ginger and tumeric, aromatic leaves and intensively flavorful ingredients such as shrimp paste, shallots, tamarind and chilli peppers. It is probably the most innovative and interesting of the Singaporean cuisines.

        Its origins are equally spicy. Malaysian women in Singapore married Chinese settlers in the 1800s because of the shortage of Chinese women there at that time. They were known as Nonyas, and their descendants are the Straits Chinese. Their creative cuisine, which grew out of a need to satisfy their husbands' Chinese tastes with their Malaysian/Indonesian culinary skills and spices, became the city nation's standard fare.

         Preparation of Nonya cuisine tends to be tedious and long. Slow cooking is common to draw out the flavours of the spices and ingredients, but stir frying is also used. Some of the more popular dishes of this type of cuisine include: Green Bean Sambal which incorporatPrepes the pungent Chinese group dried shrimp, and Otak Otak fish pate steamed in banana leaves.

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