Coconut oil

Crackle the leaf in hot coconut fat. The whole of Kerala begins here.

Pop them until they stop, and the oil takes the sulphur they let go.

Cook the grain in it and the lactones stay right through the cooling.

Curcumin will not dissolve in water. Fat and heat, or you wasted the root.

Sweet shellfish and sweet fat, held apart by chilli and nothing else.

Capsaicin is fat-soluble and this fat is sweet, so the burn arrives late.

Two sugars, one root and one lactone. Roast hard or it turns cloying.

Fry it in this and the two lactone families read as a single fruit.

The fat is sweet with no acid of its own. Juice at the end, never before.

Bland starch, sweet fat, salt. The Caribbean and Kerala reached this separately.

Sets hard at fridge temperature. That snap is the oil, not the cocoa butter.

Two Southeast Asian sweet-aromatics. Steep the leaf, strain, use it warm.

Catechin bitterness needs fat, and this one drags the tea toward tropical.

Both carry a sweet marine lactone. It sets on the shell and melts on the tongue.