Spices in Thai cooking

Coriander's citrus lift brightens pork's richness and bridges between cumin and the sweeter spices. It is a rounding presence rather than a lead flavour here.

Add alongside: Cumin, Black pepper

Turmeric gives chicken the golden colour that a great many South and Southeast Asian dishes depend on visually, alongside an earthy base note. It is used in small quantities — enough for colour, not enough for bitterness.

Add alongside: Cumin, Coriander seed, Ginger

• More than about a teaspoon in a family-sized dish turns the flavour bitter without adding useful colour.

Coriander's citric sweetness suits chicken particularly well and gives body to a sauce without weight. It is the quiet component that makes a chicken curry taste finished.

Add alongside: Cumin, Turmeric, Green cardamom

Widely used in South and Southeast Asian fish cooking for colour and a mild earthiness, and traditionally rubbed on before frying.

Add alongside: Cayenne pepper, Coriander seed

• Use sparingly; turmeric's bitterness is more noticeable against delicate fish than against meat.

Standard across coastal South Asian cooking, where prawns are turned in turmeric and salt before they meet anything else. It colours them and takes the edge off the iodine note that large prawns can carry.

Add alongside: Garlic, Chilli powder, Lemon

• Turmeric is bitter in quantity and prawns are delicate. A quarter teaspoon for a plateful, not a spoonful.

Ginger's sharpness is the corrective a sweet squash needs, in soup as much as in pie. It is the component of a pumpkin spice blend doing the most work and the one most obviously missed when it is left out.

Add alongside: Cassia, Nutmeg, Allspice

The base of most curry powders. Turmeric contributes colour and a bitter earthiness, cumin contributes aroma; neither does the other's job. Turmeric is used in much smaller quantity than its visual prominence suggests.

Add alongside: Coriander seed, Cayenne pepper

The most widely used aromatic pair in the world, and in South Asian cooking often literally one ingredient — ginger-garlic paste, pounded together and used as the base of an enormous range of dishes. Ginger is sharp and citric where garlic is sulphurous and sweet, and each covers what the other lacks.

How: Pounded together into ginger-garlic paste; Sliced or minced and fried at the start of a stir-fry

Add alongside: Onion, Chilli powder, Turmeric

• Both burn quickly and bitterly in hot fat. They go in after the pan has come off the fiercest heat, not before.
• This is a fresh-ginger pairing. Ground ginger and garlic powder are not the same combination and do not behave the same way.

A standard of Chinese and Japanese fish cookery. Ginger is used specifically to counter the smell of fish — an explicit purpose in the culinary literature rather than an incidental effect — and its citric sharpness cuts the oiliness of salmon at the same time.

How: Julienned with spring onion over steamed fish; In a soy and rice wine marinade

Add alongside: Onion, White pepper, Fennel seed

• Fresh ginger only. Ground ginger against salmon tastes of baking spice and is a well-known way to spoil a good fillet.

Two different kinds of heat used together deliberately. Ginger is pungent at the back of the throat and citric on top; chilli is pungent on the tongue and fruity behind. Neither masks the other, which is why South and Southeast Asian cooking uses both rather than choosing.

Add alongside: Garlic, Turmeric, Coriander seed

• Both are pungent and the effects add rather than cancel. A dish adjusted for one before adding the other will usually end up too hot.

The sour-sweet base of pad thai and of Malay and South Indian prawn dishes. Prawns are sweet and faintly mineral, and tamarind meets that sweetness rather than fighting it — the reason a sour prawn dish tastes balanced where a sour chicken one often does not.

How: In the sauce for pad thai, with fish sauce and palm sugar; In a Malay-style sour prawn curry

Add alongside: Chilli flakes, Coriander seed, Turmeric

Sour fish curries run from Kerala to Malaysia to Indonesia, and tamarind is the souring agent in most of them. Acid firms the flesh slightly and cuts the oiliness, and the fruit body gives the sauce a depth that lime alone cannot.

How: In a Keralan or Goan fish curry; In a Malay-style sour fish soup

Add alongside: Turmeric, Fenugreek, Mustard seed

• Add it before the fish rather than after — the acid needs time in the sauce, and the fish does not want the extra cooking.

Recorded because it is the technique rather than a flavour affinity. Tamarind carries a great deal of acid and a great deal of sugar at once, and nearly every dish built on it adds more sweetness — jaggery in sambar, palm sugar in pad thai, jaggery and dates in imli chutney. The practical consequence is that a dish tasting harshly sour usually needs sugar rather than less tamarind, which is the opposite of the instinct.

How: Jaggery melted into a tamarind-soured dal; Palm sugar in a pad thai sauce

Add alongside: Chilli flakes, Cumin, Ginger

Aubergine is rich and absorbent and turns heavy without an acid to cut it. Tamarind does that job across South Indian and Southeast Asian cooking, and unlike citrus it survives the long cooking aubergine needs.

How: In a South Indian aubergine and tamarind curry; In a sweet-sour braise with jaggery

Add alongside: Mustard seed, Fenugreek, Chilli flakes

Heat against sweetness is one of the most reliable pairings there is, and sweet potato is sweet enough to take a good deal of it. Chilli also gives the dish somewhere to go: a plain roast sweet potato is one-note in a way few vegetables are.

How: On roast wedges with lime; In a sweet potato and coconut curry

Add alongside: Cumin, Lemon, Garlic

Tom yum and the Malay sour prawn curries both run on it. Prawns are sweet and faintly mineral, and galangal’s pine-and-citrus sharpness cuts that sweetness in a way ginger cannot — ginger would meet the sweetness and compound it.

How: Sliced into a tom yum broth; Pounded into a paste for a prawn curry

Add alongside: Lemongrass, Chilli flakes, Tamarind

Tom kha gai is the dish most people meet galangal in, and the pairing is doing structural work: chicken and coconut milk together are rich and mild, and galangal supplies the sharp resinous note that stops the soup tasting flat. Left out, the dish is coconut chicken soup.

How: Sliced into a coconut and chicken soup; In a curry paste for a chicken curry

Add alongside: Lemongrass, Coriander seed, Turmeric

• Add the slices early — the aromatics disperse into the broth within minutes and the slices are not meant to be eaten.

Rendang and the Indonesian slow braises, where galangal survives hours of cooking better than most aromatics and keeps giving a resinous edge against a very rich coconut and beef base.

How: Pounded into a rempah for rendang; In a long-braised curry base

Add alongside: Turmeric, Coriander seed, Chilli flakes

Mushrooms are earthy and slightly sweet and take sharp aromatics well. In a Thai hot-and-sour soup the galangal and the mushroom do opposite jobs and the dish needs both.

How: In a hot-and-sour mushroom soup; Sliced into a braise

Add alongside: Lemongrass, White pepper, Chilli flakes

Documented across Thai, Vietnamese and Malay cooking, and it works because lemongrass gives citrus aroma without acidity. Lemon juice on chicken firms the surface and changes the texture; lemongrass gives the same bright register with none of that, which is why it can go into a marinade for hours or into a broth for minutes and do no harm either way.

How: Pounded to a paste with garlic and chilli as a marinade for grilled chicken; Bruised stalks in a poaching broth, removed before serving

Add alongside: Garlic, Galangal, Turmeric

• Only the pale lower stem is worth using; the dry upper leaf gives fibre and very little aroma.

Tom yum is the documented case and the mechanism generalises: prawns are sweet and faintly iodic, and the citral in lemongrass cuts both without adding the acid that would start cooking them. In a hot-and-sour broth it is the aromatic doing the lifting while lime juice does the souring — the two are usually assumed to be one thing and are not.

How: Bruised stalks simmered in the broth with galangal and lime leaf; Finely sliced raw through a warm prawn salad

Add alongside: Galangal, Chilli flakes, Coriander leaf

• Sliced raw it must be cut very thinly across the grain, or the fibres are unpleasant to eat.

A delicate fish is the case where lemongrass has the clearest advantage over lemon: it perfumes without acidifying, so the flesh stays soft. Steaming or grilling in a leaf parcel with bruised stalks underneath is the standard Southeast Asian treatment and puts the aroma into the fish without any liquid at all.

How: Bruised stalks laid under a whole fish for steaming or grilling; In a coconut broth for poached fish

Add alongside: Galangal, Turmeric, Coriander leaf

• Long boiling drives off the fresh top note and leaves the duller, more resinous part behind.

The defining aromatic pair of Thai cooking, and they are partners precisely because they share nothing: lemongrass is citric from citral, galangal piney and camphorous from cineole. Neither substitutes for the other and a paste built on one alone is recognisably missing an axis. Recording the pair is the useful correction to the widespread assumption that they are two versions of the same thing.

How: Both pounded into a curry paste; Both bruised into a tom kha or tom yum broth

Add alongside: Turmeric, Chilli flakes, Garlic

The standing use across East and Southeast Asian home cooking, where chicken powder — MSG with salt and chicken extract — is a pantry staple. Chicken is mild and takes savoury depth without a competing flavour, which is exactly the case MSG suits: it makes the stock taste longer-simmered without introducing anything identifiable.

How: Dissolved into a chicken stock or braise with the salt; In a marinade for fried chicken, alongside salt and pepper

Add alongside: White pepper, Garlic, Ginger

• Add it with the salt rather than instead of it. The two are different tastes and neither reaches the other’s ceiling.

Documented across Thai, Malay and Vietnamese cooking, and the reason is that prawn sweetness needs a sharp rather than a broad heat. Bird's eye arrives immediately and clears, so it cuts through without sitting on the palate for the next mouthful — the opposite of what a superhot would do to a delicate shellfish.

How: Pounded with garlic and lime into a dipping sauce for grilled prawns; Sliced raw into a warm prawn salad

Add alongside: Lemongrass, Garlic, Lemon

• Pounding spreads the placental heat through the whole sauce, so a pounded dressing eats considerably hotter than the same pods sliced.

Two separate traditions arrive at the same pairing: Thai grilled and stir-fried chicken with prik kee noo, and Portuguese-African peri-peri chicken made from the same pepper under another name. Chicken is mild enough that the chilli defines the dish, and both traditions use garlic and acid alongside it for the same reason — to carry the heat rather than to temper it.

How: Pounded with garlic and vinegar as a peri-peri marinade for grilled chicken; Sliced into a basil chicken stir-fry at the end

Add alongside: Garlic, Basil, Lemon

• In a marinade the heat penetrates and cannot be removed later, so err low and serve more chilli alongside.

Pad kaphrao is the documented case and the combination is specific: Thai holy basil is peppery and clove-like rather than sweet, and bird's eye supplies a sharp heat that sits beside that pepperiness rather than covering it. The pairing works far less well with the sweet Genovese basil most Western shops sell, which is worth knowing before attempting the dish.

How: Pounded with garlic and fried at the start, with basil thrown in at the end; Both stirred through a finished stir-fry off the heat

Add alongside: Garlic, Lemon

• Holy basil and sweet basil are different plants with different flavours. Substituting one for the other changes the dish more than changing the chilli would.

A lean, delicate fish is exactly where black pepper is too heavy — its roasted, woody depth sits on top of the fish rather than beside it. Green pepper is milder and brighter and adds pungency without weight, which makes it one of the few peppers that suits white fish in any quantity.

How: Crushed into a butter or cream sauce for poached fish; Whole corns in a Thai stir-fry with fish

Add alongside: Dill, Lemon, Lemongrass

Documented across Thai, Malay and Indonesian cooking, and the mechanism is the one that makes this leaf worth having: it supplies lime aroma without acidity. Chicken takes citrus well and firms unpleasantly under acid, so a marinade or a broth flavoured with the leaf gets the fragrance of lime peel while the texture is untouched.

How: Torn into a coconut chicken curry and removed before serving; Pounded into a curry paste with lemongrass and galangal

Add alongside: Lemongrass, Galangal, Garlic

• Tear the leaves. An intact leaf dropped into a pot releases very little, because the oil is inside the tissue rather than on the surface.

Tom yum is the documented case and it shows the division of labour clearly: the leaf supplies aroma and the lime juice supplies sourness, and cooks who assume the leaf is doing both end up with a broth that smells right and tastes flat. Prawns are sweet and faintly iodic and take the sharp citrus-floral note particularly well.

How: Torn into a tom yum broth with lemongrass and galangal; Shredded very finely through a warm prawn salad

Add alongside: Lemongrass, Galangal, Bird's eye chilli

• Shredded leaf must be cut very finely across the grain with the rib removed, or it stays tough and fibrous in the mouth.

Rendang is the case, and the pairing works because a long-cooked rich beef dish needs an aromatic that survives hours of cooking without turning bitter. The leaf is thick and leathery and gives up its oil slowly, so it holds its character through a reduction that would destroy a soft herb entirely.

How: Whole leaves through a rendang, cooked down with coconut and spice paste; In a Thai beef salad, shredded raw at the end

Add alongside: Lemongrass, Galangal, Turmeric

The one pairing in this dataset where the mechanism is not an analogy. Pandan’s dominant aroma compound, 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, is the same compound that gives basmati and jasmine rice their scent, and it is present in the leaf at far higher concentration. A knotted leaf in the pot therefore does not merely sit alongside the rice — it supplies more of exactly what fragrant rice already smells of, which is why ordinary long-grain rice cooked with pandan reads as a better grade of rice.

How: A knotted leaf cooked in the rice pot and removed before serving; In coconut rice and nasi lemak

Add alongside: Lemongrass, Curry leaf

• Knot the leaf. An intact leaf laid in whole releases very little, because the aroma is held in cells that need rupturing.

Pandan is the default sweet aromatic of Southeast Asia, occupying the position vanilla holds in European baking, and its natural partner is palm sugar. The pairing carries the whole family of kuih, the coconut jam kaya, and most of the region’s syrups and cold drinks. The leaf’s grassiness keeps a heavily sweetened preparation from cloying, which is the work it is actually doing.

How: Steeped into palm sugar syrup; Blended and strained into kuih and cake batters; In kaya, the coconut and egg jam

Add alongside: Vanilla, Green cardamom

Thai pandan-wrapped fried chicken is the case where the leaf does structural work rather than being steeped and discarded: it is a parcel and a flavouring at once, holding the marinade against the meat and perfuming it from the outside while the wrapper takes the direct heat. This is close to the only preparation in the dataset where an aromatic leaf is also a cooking vessel.

How: Marinated chicken wrapped in leaves and deep-fried; The leaf discarded at the table rather than eaten

Add alongside: Coriander seed, White pepper, Garlic

• The leaf is not eaten — it is tough and fibrous, and it is opened rather than served whole.

Pesto is the argument. Raw garlic is sharp and sulfurous, basil is sweet and floral, and pounding them together in oil produces something neither suggests alone. The technique matters: a mortar crushes fewer cells than a blade, which keeps the basil green and the bitterness down.

How: Pounded together in a mortar for pesto; Fresh basil added at the end to a garlic-based sauce

Add alongside: Cheese, Tomato, Chilli flakes

• Raw garlic goes bitter and acrid in a food processor faster than basil does.

Southern Italian cooking pairs the two constantly, and Thai cooking pairs their equivalents even harder. Basil’s sweetness and cooling quality read as relief against capsaicin heat, which is the same job coriander does in Mexican food and mint does in South Asian.

How: Chilli bloomed in the oil, basil torn in at the end; In a Thai stir-fry, where holy basil goes in with the heat

Add alongside: Garlic, Tomato

• Thai basil and holy basil survive the heat of a wok; Italian sweet basil does not.

Prawns are sweet and faintly mineral, and coriander’s citric aldehydes read against them the way lime does — which is why the three appear together across Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico and coastal India. It goes on raw and at the end; cooked coriander adds nothing here.

How: Scattered raw over a prawn curry or ceviche; Root pounded into the paste, leaves added at the end

Add alongside: Chilli flakes, Lemongrass, Lemon

Coriander is the standard counterweight to capsaicin across Mexico and South and Southeast Asia. Capsaicin is a heat signal that builds and lingers; coriander’s cooling citric quality does not remove it but changes what the mouth does with it, in the same way mint does in South Asia and basil does in Thailand.

How: Both into a fresh salsa; Chilli in the cooking, coriander on top

Add alongside: Cumin, Garlic, Lemon

Two different pungencies acting on different receptors, which is why they stack rather than compete. Capsaicin binds the heat receptor and builds slowly; gingerol is sharper, faster and fades quicker. The combination gives a heat with a front and a back to it, and it runs through Chinese, Korean, Thai and South Asian cooking.

How: Both into hot oil at the start of a stir-fry; Together in a marinade or a chilli oil

Add alongside: Garlic, Sichuan pepper, Star anise

• Ginger burns faster than chilli flakes in a dry wok; both want fat.

Heat against sweetness, and one of the most reliable corrections available for a vegetable that tends towards cloying. Capsaicin does not cancel sugar so much as give the palate a second thing to attend to, which is why chilli and squash appear together from Italy to Thailand.

How: Scattered over roasted squash with oil; In a squash curry or a stir-fry

Add alongside: Garlic, Cumin, Sage

Tofu has nothing to defend, which means it can carry heat that would flatten a meat dish. Chinese, Korean and Southeast Asian tofu cooking all take this route, and the reason is structural rather than cultural: with no competing flavour, the chilli is not covering anything up.

How: Bloomed in oil at the start of a braise; In a gochujang-based Korean stew

Add alongside: Garlic, Ginger, Sichuan pepper

The South Asian and Southeast Asian answer to the same problem, and a completely different one from the northern European route. Turmeric is bloomed in oil, which supplies the fat cod lacks, and it colours and seasons the surface rather than penetrating the flesh. Bengali and Sri Lankan fish cooking is built on this.

How: Rubbed on with salt before frying; Bloomed in oil at the start of a fish curry

Add alongside: Mustard seed, Chilli flakes, Coriander seed

• Turmeric scorches in seconds. It goes into warm oil, not hot.

Singapore chilli crab, and the Chinese and Southeast Asian tradition of cooking crab hard in a sauce rather than boiling it. The sauce mediates rather than the shell, and the sweetness of the crab is met by an equally sweet chilli sauce rather than counterweighted.

How: Bloomed in oil for a chilli crab sauce; With garlic and ginger in a stir-fried crab

Add alongside: Ginger, Garlic, Sichuan pepper

The Thai fish curries and nam ya are built on fingerroot, and the reason is specific rather than general: its bitterness cuts the oiliness and the muddiness of freshwater and oily fish in a way ginger, which is sweet, does not. It is julienned into the dish and eaten rather than infused and removed.

How: Julienned into a fish curry; Pounded into nam ya curry sauce

Add alongside: Makrut lime leaf, Galangal, Lemongrass

The two aromatics that define jungle curry, a Thai curry with no coconut milk in it. Kaffir lime leaf supplies a bright citrus lift and fingerroot supplies the bitter, peppery base, and between them they carry a dish that has no fat to round anything out. The pairing is much less prominent in the coconut curries, where galangal takes fingerroot’s place.

How: Together in gaeng pa; In Thai fish curries

Add alongside: Bird's eye chilli, Lemongrass, Galangal

Both are sweet-aromatic rather than pungent, and they overlap enough in the citrus register to reinforce rather than argue. Georgian and Thai cooking arrive at the combination independently, which is reasonable evidence it is the ingredients rather than one tradition.

How: Dried basil with ground coriander in khmeli suneli

Add alongside: Blue fenugreek

Basil is sweet and volatile and chilli is pungent and non-volatile, so neither obscures the other — the heat sits underneath the aroma rather than in front of it. Georgian ajika is built on exactly this, as is Thai phat kaphrao at the other end of the world.

How: In ajika; Basil stirred through at the end of a chilli-hot dish

Add alongside: Garlic

• Chilli content in khmeli suneli varies by maker and is not universal

Two pungencies with different mechanisms and different timings: capsaicin is slow to arrive and slow to leave, gingerol is immediate and fades, so the pair produces a heat with a shape rather than a plateau. It is a combination East Africa, West Africa and Southeast Asia all use independently.

How: In mitmita; In West African pepper mixtures

Add alongside: Garlic

The same berry from the same vine, handled two opposite ways: green is picked unripe and preserved before it can develop, white is picked ripe and fermented until the skin can be rubbed off. So this is a pairing of one plant against itself — fresh, herbaceous pungency against a deeper, slightly barnyard one — and it works for the same reason a blend of young and aged cheese does.

How: Together in a four-peppercorn blend; Green whole in a sauce, white ground into it

Add alongside: Black pepper

• Green peppercorns brined or freeze-dried are very different products; the brined ones bring acidity with them

The Thai treatment, and a good demonstration that mussels are seasoned through their liquid rather than on their flesh. Lemongrass gives citral to the broth in minutes, and the broth is what gets eaten with bread or rice.

How: Bruised into a coconut and chilli broth

Elote is chilli, lime, salt and a fatty dairy on grilled corn, and it is the clearest statement of the only rule sweetcorn imposes: it is the sweetest thing most people eat as a savoury vegetable, and heat and acid are what keep it savoury. The same combination appears independently across South and Southeast Asia.

How: On elote, with lime and cheese; Dusted over grilled cobs

Two rhizomes of the same family used together deliberately, which is the point worth making: Southeast Asian cooking treats them as different ingredients rather than as alternatives, and a paste containing both is not being redundant. Galangal is sharp, piney and almost medicinal; ginger is hot and sweet from gingerol. Substituting one for the other — the commonest assumption outside the region — removes a note rather than weakening one.

How: Ground together into a bumbu or a curry paste; Both bruised into a broth

Add alongside: Lemongrass, Turmeric

• Dried galangal is a much weaker ingredient and does not carry this pairing

The foundation of every Indonesian and Malay spice paste: allium for savoury body, galangal for the resinous top note that identifies the region. Both are wet and both are ground raw and then fried, which is what turns a harsh paste into a sweet one — the pairing is as much about the technique as the ingredients.

How: Ground into a bumbu dasar and fried until the paste darkens

Add alongside: Onion, Ginger

• An unfried paste tastes raw and harsh; the frying is not optional

The citrus pair that makes Thai cooking taste Thai, and the reason a Thai paste reads brighter than an Indonesian one. Both are dominated by citral and citronellal and neither is a citrus fruit — they supply lime and lemon aroma without acidity, which is a distinction that matters in a dish where the sourness is coming separately from tamarind or fresh lime juice.

How: Pounded together into a curry paste; Both bruised whole into a tom yum broth

Add alongside: Galangal, Bird's eye chilli

• Dried makrut leaf keeps a fraction of the aroma; frozen leaves are much closer to fresh

One plant used twice, deliberately, which is rare enough to be worth stating: Thai curry paste takes the root and the toasted seed of Coriandrum sativum in the same mortar. They taste nothing alike — the root is earthy and concentrated, the seed warm and citric — and the coincidence of species is not the reason they work together. It is also a useful corrective to the assumption that leaf and seed are two grades of one ingredient.

How: Root and toasted seed pounded into a curry paste

Add alongside: White pepper, Garlic

• The root, not the leaf. Coriander sold with roots attached is a Southeast Asian shop item

Coriander root, garlic and white pepper is the foundation trio of Thai savoury cooking — pounded together it goes under grilled meat, into marinades and into every curry paste. The root is earthier and far more concentrated than the leaf and stands up to the garlic in a way the leaf cannot.

How: Pounded with white pepper as a marinade base; In every Thai curry paste

Add alongside: White pepper

Two fresh aromatics pounded raw into the same paste, and both are ingredients a cook outside Southeast Asia is likely to substitute wrongly — coriander root for leaf, galangal for ginger. Together they supply the earthy-and-piney base that the citrus of lemongrass and makrut then sits on top of.

How: Pounded together in a curry paste

Add alongside: Lemongrass

The yellow-curry combination, and one that runs across maritime Southeast Asia rather than being Thai alone. Fresh turmeric is earthy and slightly bitter and lemongrass is bright and citric, so the pairing works by contrast — and both are fibrous fresh rhizomes and stalks that need pounding rather than chopping.

How: In yellow curry paste; In an Indonesian bumbu dasar kuning

Add alongside: Galangal, Garlic

• Fresh turmeric rather than powder; the powder is duller and more bitter

Worth recording for the history as much as the flavour: white pepper was the heat in Thai cooking before chilli arrived from the Americas in the sixteenth century, and it survives in the pastes as a background pungency underneath the chilli rather than being displaced by it. Against lemongrass it supplies a warmth the citrus has none of.

How: In a curry paste; In a coriander-root and pepper marinade

Add alongside: Coriander leaf, Garlic

Asian shallot is the sweet bulk of a Thai paste and makrut is one of the aromatics it carries, which makes this the same base-and-aromatic relationship galangal and shallot have. The shallot is fried down until sweet; the makrut is what stops the result tasting merely of onion.

How: Pounded together in a curry paste

Add alongside: Lemongrass, Garlic

A real culinary pairing in southern Thai and Malay cooking, where both go into a yellow paste: turmeric is earthy and bitter and pepper supplies a warmth that lifts it. Worth separating from the claim usually attached to it — that piperine increases curcumin absorption — which is a pharmacological proposition about supplements, has nothing to do with why the two are in a curry paste, and is not what this record asserts.

How: In yellow curry paste; In a Malay rempah

Add alongside: Coriander seed, Lemongrass

• The bioavailability claim frequently attached to this pairing concerns supplement doses and is a health question rather than a culinary one

Krachai goes into Thai jungle curry, which is made without coconut milk and is therefore hotter, sharper and more herbal than the curries most people meet — and chicken is its usual protein. Fingerroot supplies a peppery camphorous note that has room to be heard in a dish with no dairy fat to soften it.

How: Julienned into gaeng pa, the coconut-free jungle curry

• A coconut curry will bury it; this is a pairing for the leaner preparations