Cilantro Coriandrum sativum
The leaf of the same plant that produces coriander seed, and nothing like it in the mouth. Add it at the very end — heat kills it in under a minute.
2 recipes on this site
Ingredient reference photography is my own.
In the kitchen
Add it off the heat
Cilantro loses its flavor and turns dull within a minute of real heat. Stir it in after the pan comes off the stove, or scatter it at the table.
Use the stems
The stems are more flavorful and much sturdier than the leaves — finely chopped, they hold up in a salsa or a marinade in a way the leaves can't. Most cooks throw away the best part of the bunch.
Chop it right before serving
Cut cilantro browns and loses aroma fast once bruised. Chop it last, immediately before it goes on the food, rather than prepping it ahead with everything else.
Beyond the kitchen
ONE PLANT, TWO NAMES, TWO SPICES
Leaf and seed of the same plant are treated as separate ingredients almost everywhere it is grown — the seed is warm and citrusy, the leaf is bright and grassy, and a cook can use one for years without noticing they come from the same plant.
THE GENETICS OF THE SOAP TASTE
A 2012 genome-wide study by 23andMe linked cilantro-as-soap perception to a specific gene region involved in smelling aldehydes, the compounds partly responsible for cilantro's aroma and also present in soap. It was one of the first traits of its kind mapped through consumer genetic data.
A NAME THAT SPLITS BY GEOGRAPHY
American English kept the Spanish word cilantro for the leaf, borrowed through Mexican cooking, while British and most other English keeps the older French-derived coriander for both leaf and seed — a rare case where two dialects of the same language genuinely disagree on what to call the same plant part.
ONE OF THE OLDEST CULTIVATED HERBS
Coriander seeds have been found in the tomb of Tutankhamun and at other ancient Egyptian sites, making it one of the longest continuously cultivated flavoring plants in the archaeological record.
A longer history
Coriandrum sativum is native to a region spanning the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, and is among the oldest spice plants known from the archaeological record, with seeds recovered from sites dating back several thousand years, including Bronze Age Egypt.
It moved with early trade and migration across Europe, the Middle East, India and China, and different cuisines settled on different uses — India and much of Southeast Asia lean heavily on the fresh leaf, while European cooking largely kept to the dried seed and mostly lost the habit of using the leaf.
Cilantro's prominence in American cooking is comparatively recent and traces closely to the growth of Mexican, and later broader Latin American and Southeast Asian, cooking in the United States from the later twentieth century onward — before that, the fresh leaf was a minor ingredient in most American kitchens.
