Siam Villa Garden: Kaffir Lime

Citrus hystrix, called the kaffir lime or makrut lime, is a citrus fruit native to tropical Southeast Asia and southern China.

Its fruit and leaves are used in Southeast Asian cuisine and its essential oil is used in perfumery. Its rind and crushed leaves emit an intense citrus fragrance.

"Kaffir" is thought to ultimately derive from the Arabic kafir, meaning infidel, though the mechanism by which it came to be applied to the lime is uncertain. Following the takeover of the Swahili coast, Muslims used the term to refer to the non-Muslim indigenous Africans, who were increasingly abducted for the Indian Ocean slave trade, which reached a height in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.

The most likely etymology is through the Kaffirs, an ethnic group in Sri Lanka partly descended from Bantu slaves. The earliest known reference, under the alternative spelling "caffre" is in 1888 book The Cultivated Oranges, Lemons Etc. of India and Ceylon by Emanuel Bonavia, who notes, "The plantation coolies also smear it over their feet and legs, to keep off land leeches; and therefore in Ceylon [Sri Lanka] it has got also the name of Kudalu dchi, or Leech Lime. Europeans call it Caffre Lime." Similarly, H.F. MacMillan's 1910 book A Handbook of Tropical Gardening and Planting notes, "The 'Kaffir Lime' in Ceylon."

Another proposed etymology is directly by Indian Muslims of the imported fruit from the non-Muslim lands to the east to "convey otherness and exotic provenance."[9] Claims that the name of the fruit derives directly from the South African ethnic slur "kaffir" (see "Name" below) are not well supported.

C. hystrix leaves are used in Southeast Asian cuisines such as Indonesian, Laotian, Cambodian, and Thai.[citation needed] The leaves are the most frequently used part of the plant, fresh, dried, or frozen. The leaves are widely used in Thai (for dishes such as tom yum) and Cambodian cuisine (for the base paste "krueng"). The leaves are used in Vietnamese cuisine to add fragrance to chicken dishes and to decrease the pungent odor when steaming snails. The leaves are used in Indonesian cuisine (especially Balinese cuisine and Javanese cuisine) for foods such as soto ayam and are used along with Indonesian bay leaf for chicken and fish. They are also found in Malaysian and Burmese cuisines.

The rind (peel) is commonly used in Lao and Thai curry paste, adding an aromatic, astringent flavor. The zest of the fruit, referred to as combava, is used in creole cuisine to impart flavor in infused rums and rougails in Mauritius, Réunion, and Madagascar. In Cambodia, the entire fruit is crystallized/candied for eating.

The juice and rinds of the peel are used in traditional medicine in some Asian countries; the fruit's juice is often used in shampoo and is believed to kill head lice.