Adas

Foeniculum vulgare (Malaysia, adas pedas because of its sharp, minty flavour). This is fennel, which originated in the Mediterranean and the Middle East but must have been taken across Asia many centuries ago. In Indonesia we use the fresh young leaves and flowers (bunga adas) or the newly developed seed (biji adas), but not the bulb or blanched stems that are sold as fennel in an English greengrocer’s. Indeed, we do not, as far as I know, earth-up or blanch the plant at all. (See also adas cina and jinten manis; all these plants, or their seeds, contain either anethol or carvone, which accounts for a certain family resemblance among their different flavours. You would have to get well down into the molecular structure of these substances to appreciate very much difference between any two of them.)