pandan
pandan · bai toey · screwpine
Cultural layer
Pandanus amaryllifolius Roxb. (Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, accessed 2026-10-04)
The Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson, 1999)
Bangkok: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of Thailand (Leela Punyaratabandhu, 2017)
Simple Thai Food (Leela Punyaratabandhu, 2014)
Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery (Sri Owen, 1994)
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
Pandan leaves are folded into offerings and hung at doorways across Southeast Asia, and in Balinese canang sari the daily offering tray is assembled from leaves and flowers whose scent is the part the gods receive. A leaf used because it perfumes the air rather than because it feeds anyone ends up in ceremony by the same logic as incense. Its green is also the colour of the sweets made for festivals.
Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery (Sri Owen, 1994)
Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled
FoodwayPresent as a living food culture.
- pandanEndonymMalay/Indonesian · maritime SE Asia
- bai toeyEndonymThai · Thailand
- screwpineMarketEnglish · global market
Connections
8 bonds · 7 sourcedKue putu, the steamed coconut cup cakes, and es cendol.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, page 204, kue putu: coconut milk and pandanus leaf juice in the batter; page 214, es cendol. The book has no kaya.
Lalampa, glutinous rice cooked in coconut milk with a pandanus leaf.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, page 98, lalampa: glutinous rice cooked in thick coconut milk with a pandanus leaf; page 97, the Manado rice cakes with pandanus leaf. The book has no nasi lemak.
Bandrek, the hot ginger drink, sweetened with gula Jawa and scented with pandanus leaf.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, page 216, kopi jahe, which the Javanese call bandrek: ginger, gula Jawa and a small pandanus leaf. The book has no kaya and no gula melaka.
Kolak pisang: banana in coconut milk with palm sugar and pandan, taken to break the fast.
Sweetened pandan preparations.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, page 204, kue putu, the steamed coconut cup cakes: castor sugar and pandanus leaf juice in the batter.
Es campur and the kue table.
Kai ho bai toey, chicken wrapped in the leaf.
Read in Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok, 2017, Rice Accompaniments: fried chicken in pandan leaves (kai ho bai toei), marinated thighs wrapped in pandan and deep-fried, a dish of the D'Jit Pochana restaurant.
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, "pandan", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/pandan
/archive/pandan
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.