lemongrass
Cultural layer
Cymbopogon citratus and Cymbopogon flexuosus (Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, accessed 2026-10-02)
Lemon Grass, model project report (National Horticulture Board, India, accessed 2026-10-02)
Kieu Trinh (Kate) Nguyen, Vietnamese migrants overcome years of struggle to succeed in Australian farming (ABC Rural, 18 August 2017)
Bangkok: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of Thailand (Leela Punyaratabandhu, 2017)
Route
PendingThe routes are written. They are not yet mapped.
This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.
1 of 409 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype
- Waypoints
Ordered places, each with its kind
- Coordinates
Real positions, with the gazetteer they came from
- Segments
From, to, and the mechanism that moved it
- Confidence
Documented, attributed or contested
- Summary
What the route argues, in a sentence
Rite
Lemongrass is planted at the boundary of a compound across Southeast Asia to mark it and to keep snakes off, and it appears in Thai and Khmer offerings and in the water used for ritual bathing. It is not chewed or swallowed in most dishes: it is bruised, steeped and removed. An ingredient designed to be taken back out again is closer to incense than to a vegetable.
Bangkok: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of Thailand (Leela Punyaratabandhu, 2017)
Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled
FoodwayPresent as a living food culture.
No names recorded.
Connections
19 bonds · 18 sourcedCurry paste base.
Read in Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok, 2017, Basic Recipes: red curry paste (nam phrik kaeng phet), dried chiles pounded with galangal, lemongrass, makrut lime rind and shrimp paste; the beef green curry (kaeng khiao wan nuea), Rice Accompaniments, builds the same way.
The Thai aromatic trio.
Read in Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok, 2017, Rice Accompaniments: hot and sour fish soup (tom yam pla), lemongrass, makrut lime leaves and galangal smashed into the stock, with fish sauce, lime juice and bird's eye chiles. Also tom kha kai klan.
Thai curry.
Read in Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok, 2017, Basic Recipes: red curry paste (nam phrik kaeng phet), dried chiles pounded with galangal, lemongrass, makrut lime rind and shrimp paste; the beef green curry (kaeng khiao wan nuea), Rice Accompaniments, builds the same way. Also tom kha kai klan.
Tom yum.
Read in Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok, 2017, Rice Accompaniments: hot and sour fish soup (tom yam pla), lemongrass, makrut lime leaves and galangal smashed into the stock, with fish sauce, lime juice and bird's eye chiles.
Curry paste.
Read in Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok, 2017, Basic Recipes: red curry paste (nam phrik kaeng phet), dried chiles pounded with galangal, lemongrass, makrut lime rind and shrimp paste; the beef green curry (kaeng khiao wan nuea), Rice Accompaniments, builds the same way.
Bami tom yam kung nam khon, the creamy tom yam noodle soup with shrimp.
Read in Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok, 2017, Set Meals and One-Plate Meals: creamy tom yam noodle soup with shrimp (bami tom yam kung nam khon), shrimp in a stock with makrut lime leaves, galangal and lemongrass, the book's tom yam kung.
Laksa.
Laksa and rojak aromatics.
Kuah sambal goreng: candlenuts in the paste, lemon grass in the sauce.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, page 225, kuah sambal goreng: two candlenuts, optional, in the paste, and a stem of lemon grass in the coconut milk.
Pangek, West Sumatran fish simmered in coconut milk with lemon grass and kemangi.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, pages 52 and 53, pangek, Owen's Sumatran grandmother's fish: two stems of lemon grass and a handful or more of kemangi.
Duck in green sauce: kencur and lemon grass in one paste.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, page 78, duck in green sauce: kencur with lemon grass in the paste.
The guayusada, the Kichwa dawn ritual.
The soup aromatics papeda is eaten with.
Arsik, the Batak fish, lemongrass in the bumbu beside the andaliman and asam cikala.
Saeng wa, the grilled river prawn relish: lemongrass with young ginger.
Read in Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok, 2017, Rice Accompaniments: grilled river prawn relish (saeng wa), paper-thin lemongrass with young ginger cut into whisker-thin strips, tamarind, lime and bitter orange.
The rempah base.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, page 225, kuah sambal goreng: shrimp paste in the paste, lemon grass in the sauce it simmers in.
The sour fruit in a Javanese sayur.
Rawon.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, page 159, rawon: a stem of lemon grass in the pot with the kluwek paste.
Bonds are drawn from culinary literature and origin-tradition references, tiered by source. Origin means a reference from the place. Witness means the pairing is the place's own and the reference documenting it was written from outside.
The score is cultural weight: how central a pairing is in the tradition that documents it. It is not a prediction of how two materials behave in a formulation and not a measure of chemical affinity. The scale is ordinal, because centrality is a judgement rather than a measurement: 1.0 where the pair is the dish, 0.9 a fixed named form, 0.8 a canonical dish, 0.7 recurrent across many dishes, 0.6 common, 0.5 attested, 0.4 marginal or compound-led.
Each score is set against a named dish and carries that dish in its note. Where a score has not been examined it says so, because an inherited figure and a researched one should not look alike.
The dish is named by a reader who knows the cuisine and cites a source appropriate to it. It has not yet been confirmed inside that source page by page, so a note records what supports a score rather than what has been checked in the book.
Studio Culinar-E, "lemongrass", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/lemongrass
/archive/lemongrass
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.