Reference point
Lift the lid of a pot of sticky rice that has just finished cooking.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Sweet, warm, with a popcorn note and a touch of milk. It has no sharpness and no edges, only roundness and fullness.
This whole smell is dominated by a single molecule, and that same molecule also makes the smell of pandan leaf — two things with no botanical relationship at all. A grass and a tropical plant, far apart on the family tree, make the same compound.
This is the most intimate reference point in the whole dictionary. You have smelled it thousands of times before knowing it had a name, and perhaps that is why it is hard to describe: what is too familiar is usually passed over by language.
How to smell it
Lift the lid of a pot of sticky rice that has just finished cooking and smell the first puff of steam. That is the only moment of the day when this smell is at its highest concentration. If you have no steamed sticky rice, sticky rice cooked in a rice cooker will do, though it is lighter.
Why this one is hard
Because it is bound so tightly to memory that people describe a feeling instead of a smell. The usual answers are cosy, Tet, home. The exercise here is to set all the feelings aside and talk only about the smell.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Freshly cooked sticky rice
Gourmand family
Almost the same molecule. Pandan has an extra green layer from the fresh leaf; sticky rice has an extra milky note.
This entry
Freshly cooked sticky rice
Gourmand family
The same ingredient, differing in fire. Sticky rice is sweet and milky; scorched rice crust is lightly burnt and much more lasting.
Scientific note
2-Acetyl-1-pyrroline forms in the grain of sticky rice and increases with cooking. The human nose detects it at parts-per-billion levels, so a tiny amount defines the whole smell of the pot. The newer the rice, the higher the content, and it declines during storage — which is why old sticky rice cooks up less fragrant.
In Vietnamese life
Nếp cái hoa vàng and several other speciality varieties of sticky rice have been selected over many generations precisely because they contain more of this compound. In other words, farmers were selecting for a specific molecule long before anyone isolated it.