Reference point
Grated coconut flesh toasted golden in a dry pan.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Fatty, sweet, creamy, with a little wood. It is heavy and stays longer than most smells in the gourmand family.
The fatty part comes from lactones — the same group that builds the smell of ripe peach and condensed milk. The three always sound alike towards the end even though they have nothing in common in origin, and once you notice what they share you will not forget it.
Freshly grated and toasted coconut give two quite different smells. Fresh coconut is clear, cool, faintly fishy; only toasted coconut has the wood and the scorch. Heat here does not just release smell but creates new smell.
How to smell it
Grate a little coconut and divide it in two. Smell the fresh half first. Toast the rest in a dry pan until golden, let it cool a little, then smell it. The two smells are further apart than you would expect, and the distance between them is the work of the fire.
Why this one is hard
Lactones are hard to name because there is no established word for the fatty impression in a smell. People borrow words from taste such as rich, or simply say it smells nice — neither is accurate.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Toasted coconut
Gourmand family
The same lactones give the fatty impression. Coconut has a fibrous note and a light scorch on the outside; condensed milk is soft and lacks that scorch.
Scientific note
Lactones such as gamma-nonalactone and delta-decalactone give a fatty, creamy impression even though they are not fats themselves. The same group builds the smell of ripe peach, condensed milk and osmanthus. The brain interprets them as the presence of fat, and it is one of the clearest examples of smell suggesting a texture, not just a smell.
In Vietnamese life
Ben Tre and the other Mekong Delta provinces process coconut on a large scale, but almost all of it goes into oil and desiccated coconut. The smell of toasted coconut, the most characteristic of all, exists almost only in home kitchens.