Reference point
Crush a fresh pomelo leaf and smell your palm.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Green, warm, with a faint floral note and a touch of resin. Thicker than lime leaf and less metallic.
It belongs to the same genus as lime leaf but goes in another direction: lime leaf leans towards soap and metal, pomelo leaf towards flowers and resin. This is a complete trio within the genus Citrus that is easy to get hold of — peel, lime leaf, pomelo leaf — and smelling all three in a row is the best lesson in how a single plant genus diversifies.
A crushed leaf and a boiled leaf give two different smells. A pot of pomelo-leaf water has a sweetness the fresh leaf lacks.
How to smell it
Crush a pomelo leaf in one hand and a lime leaf in the other, and smell them in turn. Then squeeze a piece of pomelo peel as well. Three smells, one genus, and none of them can be confused with another.
Why this one is hard
Because pomelo leaf is rarely smelled on its own — it is always in the steam pot with five or six other kinds of leaf.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Pomelo leaf
Green family
The same genus, Citrus, but two directions. Lime leaf leans towards soap and metal; pomelo leaf leans towards flowers and resin.
Scientific note
Pomelo leaf and pomelo peel have quite different compositions although they come from the same tree. The leaf leans towards aldehydes and alcohols, the peel towards hydrocarbons. This is organ specialisation: the same genome, with each tissue switching on a different biosynthetic branch according to its function.
In Vietnamese life
Pomelo leaf is a fixed ingredient of the hair-washing water and the year-end bath water in the north. Washing your hair with pomelo-leaf water on the last afternoon of the lunar year is one of the longest-kept scent rituals in Vietnamese life.