Reference point
A ripe yellow gold apple in a net bag, smelled from a hand’s span away.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Sweet, with a floral note and a faint milky layer. It does not quite belong to the citrus family but stands at its edge, carrying traits of both fruit and flower.
What is remarkable is that the gold apple is barely edible but is kept just to be smelled. Very few fruits in the world have that fate, and it says something about how Vietnamese people treat scent.
The smell lasts longer than most fruit. A gold apple in a net bag gives off its scent for many days, fading gradually rather than stopping suddenly.
How to smell it
Put the fruit in a net bag hung in a corner of the room and smell it once a day for a week. This is one of the rare entries where the right way to use it is to let it scent the room rather than bring it to your nose.
Why this one is hard
Because gold apples are increasingly rare in cities, and because the fruit is so tightly bound to the folk tale of Tấm and Cám that people remember the story before the smell.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Gold apple
Citrus family
The gold apple has the floury, green note of fruit peel; osmanthus is sweeter and has lactones that give a creamy feel the gold apple lacks entirely.
Scientific note
We have not found a reliable description of the volatile composition of the gold apple (Diospyros decandra) in the literature available to us. This entry therefore has only the sensory part, and we leave the mechanism blank rather than guess from related species.
In Vietnamese life
In the Vietnamese folk tale, the quả thị is where Tấm hides, and the old woman who takes the fruit home asks for it only to smell it, not to eat it. It is perhaps the earliest record in Vietnamese literature of a fruit valued entirely for its scent.