These three English culinary terms all come from the Greek root koriandron. The title of this post lists them not in alphabetical order, but in Judy-order, as I came to know these flavorings during my life. I’ll wrap up the post with more about the words’ etymologies in English — and, of course, Spanish.
Coriander has been part of my cooking vocabulary since I was old enough to wield a wooden spoon. It is a seed that is often sold ground, as a powder.
Cilantro, the leafy herb, came on the scene when I was a little older, when Vietnamese and Thai restaurants began to proliferate, and Chinese restaurants ventured beyond the Cantonese food I grew up with. It is often called “Chinese parsley”; I dislike this term because the flavors of cilantro and parsley are so different. It took me a few years to realize that cilantro was the herb (coriandrum sativum) that grew from coriander seeds. This would have been more obvious if I had encountered these ingredients in Spanish, where both are called cilantro. Some people dislike the taste of cilantro leaves because they have a genetic sensitivity to the aldehyde compounds that cilantro shares with soap. I’m glad to say that this has never been a problem for me. I love the stuff!
Most recently I learned of the leafy herb culantro, biologically eryngium foetidum, from the excellent The Blue Zones Kitchen cookbook. I was able to find it at our local H-Mart under its Vietnamese name, ngò gai. In the Americas is is used most often in Caribbean cooking.
Back to etymology: according to Spanish Word Histories and Mysteries, all three words come from the Latin word coriandrum, which was borrowed from Greek koriandron, which itself “is probably borrowed from some language of the Mediterranean region that has long since become extinct.” (The authors point out that many Latin words from herbs and foods were borrowed from Greek.) Coriandrum developed into Spanish culantro, and cilantro later arose as a variant. In French, coriandrum developed in to coriandre, which English borrowed as coriander.
The autoritative Spanish etymologist Joan Corominas categorizes the change of the first r of coriandrum to the l of culantro as an example of ‘dissimilation’, the process whereby nearby sounds became more different from each other in order to make a word easier to pronounce. (Unfortunately, this etymology is not included in Corominas’s desktop etymological dictionary, but only in the full six-volume set you might find in a research library). A similar change occurred in the evolution of Spanish roble ‘oak’ from Vulgar Latin robore, and of French pélerin from Latin peregrinus. Corominas is unable to explain the evolution of cilantro from culantro, but suggests it might have been influenced by the word celidonia (celandine in English, botanically Chelidonium majus), whose leaves are toxic if ingested, and whose sap has been used as a folk remedy for warts.
Culantro first appeared in written form in 1385, and cilantro in 1680. Cilantro overtook culantro in the late 20th century, as shown by this Google ngram analysis. Maybe that’s when culantro came to be associated specifically with eryngium foetidum.
