Coriander

Coriander, Coriandrum sativum, the leaf known in many countries as cilantro, is an aromatic annual of the carrot family, one of the oldest of cultivated herbs, its seeds found in ancient Egyptian tombs. It earns a place in scripture as a measure of colour and size: the manna that fed Israel in the wilderness is twice compared to coriander seed, white and small. The plant's name is often derived from the Greek koris, a bug, for the sharp smell of the unripe seed and fresh leaf, which some relish and others find offensive, a division now known to have a partly genetic basis in the sense of smell.

Coriander seeds were among the offerings placed in the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, found still preserved when the tomb was opened in 1922, physical evidence for a plant already ancient by the time of the New Kingdom and one whose seed keeps remarkably well over millennia. The plant travelled far beyond Egypt and the Near East in antiquity: it is named in the Sanskrit medical literature of ancient India and was later carried by Spanish colonists to the Americas, where cilantro, from the Spanish word for the same plant, became and remains one of the defining flavours of Mexican and wider Latin American cooking.

Coriander had a long reputation as a plant of love and desire. It appears in the erotic charms of the ancient world and in the tales of the Thousand and One Nights among the ingredients of aphrodisiac preparations, and its seeds were carried in love-sachets and used in charms to secure affection, folklore recorded here as history rather than as fact. The Chinese associated it with immortality and long life. Across these settings the seed's warm, sweet, orange-like fragrance when ripe, so unlike the sharp green smell of the fresh plant, underlies a symbolism of love, warmth and lasting union.

Coriander seed is also one of the primary botanicals in classic gin, second in most recipes only to juniper itself, its warm citrus-like note a defining part of the London dry style since the eighteenth century, a use resting on nothing more mystical than the seed's genuinely attractive aromatic oil. In parts of the Mediterranean and South Asia, coriander seeds coated in sugar became comfits, a sweet still made today, tying the seed's old association with sweetness and love to an actual confection rather than only to charm and legend.

Coriander leaf and seed are also, botanically, the same plant at two different stages, an unusual case among common culinary herbs where the fresh leaf and the dried spice, tasting so different that some cooks barely recognise them as related, come from a single annual grown for one purpose or the other depending on when it is harvested.