Reference point
Open a packet of shredded thuốc lào tobacco and smell it before it is lit.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Rich, sweet, with notes of honey and hay and a layer of earth. Heavy and clinging.
Unlit and lit thuốc lào are two quite different smells. The unlit version is sweet and like cured hay; lit, the sweetness is covered by smoke and moves into the smoky and mineral family.
The honeyed sweetness comes from curing the leaves, during which sugars and amino acids react slowly at low temperature over many months.
How to smell it
Smell the shredded tobacco in its packet before lighting. If you have the chance, smell the smoke from a bamboo water pipe from a few metres away. The two smells are further apart than you would expect.
Why this one is hard
Because the social stigma attached to it means people never smell it seriously.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Water-pipe tobacco
Medicinal family
Water-pipe tobacco is a product of curing, so it has a sour, sweet note underneath; straw smoke is a product of fire, dry and purely phenolic.
Scientific note
Thuốc lào and ordinary tobacco both go through curing, in which enzymes and microbes break down proteins and carbohydrates into new aromatic compounds. Furfural and pyrazines form at this stage. The fresh leaf has no such smell — it is a product of time and microbes, closer to fish sauce than to a leaf.
In Vietnamese life
Tien Lang and Vinh Bao are the two most famous growing areas, and connoisseurs tell the regions apart by the smell of the unlit tobacco. It is a sophisticated system of sensory judgement that has almost never been formally recorded.