Mastic

Greek Easter bread never uses one without the other. Resin and kernel, both bitter.

Salep and dondurma: the resin makes dairy stretch and taste faintly of forest.

Perfume plus pine; the resin is what stops rose collapsing into soap.

Ground with sugar or it clumps. That is the only way it goes into anything.

A gram in a whole dough, and the crumb smells of a hillside in August.

Floral sugar rounds the medicinal edge and leaves the cold pine behind.

Spoon-sweet logic: resin against stone fruit, and neither loses an argument.

Two cold bitternesses, one peel and one sap, finishing at the same moment.

Green resinous nut under green resinous sap; the fat carries all of it.

Pine on pine. The resin does juniper work with a longer, colder finish.

The resin stops the berry tasting like jam and makes it taste picked.

Aegean resin on an Aegean fish: pine and sea, nothing between.

Pine resin sets the pudding chewy; Anatolian bakers count it as structural.

Pine resin makes the cream chewy and the whole thing smell of a hot hillside.

Two resinous Mediterranean luxuries; the resin gives the hay a pine spine.

Resin cuts fat the way rosemary does, but cold and faintly sweet with it.