Red palm oil

Cooked down in dendê, the bitterness rounds out into something closer to a vegetable stew.

Beans stewed in it go orange and stay orange. The fat is the seasoning.

Ripe fruit fried in a fat that is already fruity; the sugar takes the colour too.

Bahia poaches shellfish in it and coconut milk until the pot turns the colour of brick.

The standard fat for this leaf on two continents, and it puts the colour back.

It coats the mucilage instead of fighting it, which is the whole point of the soup.

Ground shrimp and orange fat is the floor most West African stews are built on.

Capsaicin dissolves straight into it, so the heat is even and the perfume survives.

Pounded yam wants a fat with colour and weight behind it. Butter does nothing here.

Sweated in orange fat until it collapses — the first ten minutes of half the continent.

Dendê holds the leaf oils and stains the pot orange. Pará and Bahia agreeing, for once.

Dende carries the heat and stains everything orange. Bahia cooks with both at once.

Toasted into gari, the starch takes the colour and a faint smell of violets.

Fry the base until the oil floats clear on top. That layer is how you know it is done.

Two tropical fats, one earthy and one sweet. The coconut lifts the palm off the tongue.

Steam it in the oil with chilli and the shell perfumes the fat before the meat does.

Both set soft and both smell faintly of flowers. Bahia has sold them side by side for centuries.

Bahia's orange fat brushed onto a Ceará cheese. Two northeastern things that never share a plate.

The same carotenes twice over. Roast the root in it and the colour goes almost fluorescent.

Nobody cuts a fat this heavy with acid. Do it anyway and the violets come forward.