Reference point
A freshly planed block of jackfruit wood, smelled at the planed face.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Warm, lightly sweet, with a milky note and a little resin. Very different from pine: it has no edge, no cold, and no solvent note.
Old jackfruit wood and freshly planed wood differ considerably. A surface left for years is almost mute; only planing or sanding to expose the inside brings the smell back. This is true of all wood and is why old furniture is sanded again when it is restored.
This is the warm-wood reference, the counterweight to pine as the cold-wood reference.
How to smell it
Ask a carpentry workshop for a handful of jackfruit-wood shavings, or sand hard on an old jackfruit-wood piece and smell the sanded spot at once. Compare it with pine sawdust in the same session.
Why this one is hard
Because furniture at home is usually painted or varnished, and what you smell is the coating, not the wood.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Jackfruit wood
Woody & Resinous family
Jackfruit wood is warm, sweet and milky; pine is dry, cold, edged and has a solvent note.
This entry
Jackfruit wood
Woody & Resinous family
Sandalwood has a clear creamy, milky note; jackfruit wood is warmer and sweeter but lacks the cream.
Scientific note
Jackfruit wood is used for statues and musical instruments mainly for its mechanical properties and durability, not for its smell. Its volatile composition has hardly been described in the literature available to us, so we do not propose any mechanism.
In Vietnamese life
Jackfruit wood is the most common wood for devotional statues and altar objects in the north, chosen for its fine grain, resistance to cracking and yellow colour. Its smell is therefore tied, in many people’s memory, to communal houses and pagodas.