shea butter
Cultural layer
Iago Hale and colleagues, Genomic Resources to Guide Improvement of the Shea Tree (Frontiers in Plant Science, 2021)
Koutchoukalo Aleza and colleagues, Shea (Vitellaria paradoxa Gaertn C. F.) fruit yield assessment and management by farm households in the Atacora district of Benin (PLoS ONE, 2018)
The Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson, 1999)
Vitellaria paradoxa C.F.Gaertn. (Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, accessed 2026-10-08)
Marlène Elias and Judith Carney, African Shea Butter: A Feminized Subsidy from Nature (Africa 77(1), 2007)
Senegal: Modern Senegalese Recipes (Pierre Thiam, 2015)
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
Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled
FoodwayPresent as a living food culture.
No names recorded.
Connections
6 bonds · 6 sourcedScore unexamined
Cooking fat.
Score unexamined
Cooking fat.
Score unexamined
Cooking fat in Sahel and savanna dishes.
A cocoa butter equivalent in manufacture, in no kitchen.
Shea is a cocoa butter equivalent. Its triglycerides are dominated by the same stearic-oleic-stearic arrangement that gives cocoa butter its sharp melt just below body temperature, so the two co-crystallise rather than separating, and a blend still snaps and melts like chocolate. EU law permits five percent of it and five other fats, shea among them, in anything sold as chocolate. The physics works. No kitchen tradition does this, which is why the score stays at the compound-led anchor rather than rising to meet the chemistry.
Directive 2000/36/EC on cocoa and chocolate products, and the Joint Research Centre work on detecting cocoa butter equivalents (European Union, accessed 2026-09-13)
Read in Directive 2000/36/EC, Annex II: shea, Butyrospermum parkii, is one of six vegetable fats permitted up to five percent in chocolate as a cocoa butter equivalent, which must be rich in POP, POSt and StOSt triglycerides.
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, "shea butter", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/shea-butter
/archive/shea-butter
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.