Was I writing about exotic sources of vegetable fats? I was . I went off there down the Shorea robusta [Sal] rabbit-hole pretending that I knew enough about shea butter which comes from the nuts of Vitellaria paradoxa (formerly Butyrospermum parkii ). The old Latin name - [Mungo] Park's butter-seed - is indicative of its relevance to botany. V. paradoxa is an, indigenous to Africa, member of the pan-tropical family Sapotaceae.known locally as shí or carité. Irish supermarkets, showing a want of marketing im
For a sense of scale, those shea seeds [above L] (not to be confused with chia seeds from Salvia hispanica in Mexico) are the size of a chestnut and are found in the centre of apricot sized yellow-green fruit. The seeds are 50% fat, which is rendered from the nuts by pressing - like olives. Raw pressed oil, even extra virgin, is kinda rank from a mess of proteinaceous and alkaloid congeners. The oil can be refined - if only by adding hot water to the mix and skimming the fat off the top and is widely used
Still waters run deep. Our nearest neighbour but five lives about 500m further West up our valley. That family were the first blow-ins and built a wooden house at the top of a 2 acre site purchased from one of the local farmers. Over the next 30 years trees grew up on the slope, so that from across the valley, especially with wisps of fog, the house looks like it escaped from Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. And when I say built a wooden house it was Paddy the Dad who sawed, morticed and tenoned the whole edifi