Hing is the ingredient nobody can identify and everybody notices when it is missing. Dried resin from a giant fennel, ground with flour, and used in quantities measured on a fingertip.

It only works in hot fat. Stirred into a finished dish raw, it is unpleasant.

Add it to oil with the mustard and cumin seeds at the start of a tempering, count to two, then keep going. Used properly it gives dal the savoury depth people assume came from onion.

On the spice shelf at Curry Corner, North Melbourne.