Kaffir Lime

Kaffir lime is native to tropical and southern Asia, where the leaves — not the fruit — have been a defining flavor in Thai, Cambodian, Lao, and Indonesian cooking for centuries, used whole or shredded in curries and soups much the way a bay leaf is used in Western cooking. The fruit itself is knobby, seedy, and yields very little juice, used mainly for its intensely fragrant zest. The English common name has increasingly fallen out of favor: researcher David Karp has traced "kaffir" to the Arabic word kafara ("infidel" or "disbeliever"), likely picked up by Indian Muslim traders to describe goods coming from Buddhist Southeast Asia and documented in a Portuguese-derived spelling as early as an 1888 English publication describing a fruit found in Sri Lanka — a term now widely recognized as an offensive slur in parts of Africa as well. The fruit is increasingly sold and referred to instead as makrut lime, its name in Thailand.