Cilantro-phobia~Why cilantro tastes like dish soap to some (not to me)

[big brown horse]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/dining/14curious.html

FOOD partisanship doesnt usually reach the same heights of animosity as the political variety, except in the case of the anti-cilantro party. The green parts of the plant that gives us coriander seeds seem to inspire a primal revulsion among an outspoken minority of eaters.

Culinary sophistication is no guarantee of immunity from cilantrophobia. In a television interview in 2002, Larry King asked Julia Child which foods she hated. She responded: Cilantro and arugula I dont like at all. Theyre both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.

So you would never order it? Mr. King asked.

Never, she responded. I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.

Ms. Child had plenty of company for her feelings about cilantro (arugula seems to be less offensive). The authoritative Oxford Companion to Food notes that the word coriander is said to derive from the Greek word for bedbug, that cilantro aroma has been compared with the smell of bug-infested bedclothes and that Europeans often have difficulty in overcoming their initial aversion to this smell. Theres an I Hate Cilantro Facebook page with hundreds of fans and an I Hate Cilantro blog.

Yet cilantro is happily consumed by many millions of people around the world, particularly in Asia and Latin America. The Portuguese put fistfuls into soups. What is it about cilantro that makes it so unpleasant for people in cultures that dont much use it?

Some people may be genetically predisposed to dislike cilantro, according to often-cited studies by Charles J. Wysocki of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. But cilantrophobe genetics remain little known and arent under systematic investigation. Meanwhile, history, chemistry and neurology have been adding some valuable pieces to the puzzle.

The coriander plant is native to the eastern Mediterranean, and European cooks used both seeds and leaves well into medieval times.

Helen Leach, an anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has traced unflattering remarks about cilantro flavor and the bug etymology not endorsed by modern dictionaries back to English garden books and French farming books from around 1600, when medieval dishes had fallen out of fashion. She suggests that cilantro was disparaged as part of a general effort to define the new European table against the flavors of the old.

Modern cilantrophobes tend to describe the offending flavor as soapy rather than buggy. I dont hate cilantro, but it does sometimes remind me of hand lotion. Each of these associations turns out to make good chemical sense.

Flavor chemists have found that cilantro aroma is created by a half-dozen or so substances, and most of these are modified fragments of fat molecules called aldehydes. The same or similar aldehydes are also found in soaps and lotions and the bug family of insects.

Soaps are made by fragmenting fat molecules with strongly alkaline lye or its equivalent, and aldehydes are a byproduct of this process, as they are when oxygen in the air attacks the fats and oils in cosmetics. And many bugs make strong-smelling, aldehyde-rich body fluids to attract or repel other creatures.

The published studies of cilantro aroma describe individual aldehydes as having both cilantrolike and soapy qualities. Several flavor chemists told me in e-mail messages that they smell a soapy note in the whole herb as well, but still find its aroma fresh and pleasant.

So the cilantro aldehydes are olfactory Jekyll-and-Hydes. Why is it only the evil, soapy side that shows up for cilantrophobes, and not the charming one?

I posed this question to Jay Gottfried, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who studies how the brain perceives smells.

Dr. Gottfried turned out to be a former cilantrophobe who could speak from personal experience. He said that the great cilantro split probably reflects the primal importance of smell and taste to survival, and the brains constant updating of its database of experiences.

The senses of smell and taste evolved to evoke strong emotions, he explained, because they were critical to finding food and mates and avoiding poisons and predators. When we taste a food, the brain searches its memory to find a pattern from past experience that the flavor belongs to. Then it uses that pattern to create a perception of flavor, including an evaluation of its desirability.

If the flavor doesnt fit a familiar food experience, and instead fits into a pattern that involves chemical cleaning agents and dirt, or crawly insects, then the brain highlights the mismatch and the potential threat to our safety. We react strongly and throw the offending ingredient on the floor where it belongs.

When your brain detects a potential threat, it narrows your attention, Dr. Gottfried told me in a telephone conversation. You dont need to know that a dangerous food has a hint of asparagus and sorrel to it. You just get it away from your mouth.

But he explained that every new experience causes the brain to update and enlarge its set of patterns, and this can lead to a shift in how we perceive a food.

I didnt like cilantro to begin with, he said. But I love food, and I ate all kinds of things, and I kept encountering it. My brain must have developed new patterns for cilantro flavor from those experiences, which included pleasure from the other flavors and the sharing with friends and family. Thats how people in cilantro-eating countries experience it every day.

So I began to like cilantro, he said. It can still remind me of soap, but its not threatening anymore, so that association fades into the background, and I enjoy its other qualities. On the other hand, if I ate cilantro once and never willingly let it pass my lips again, there wouldnt have been a chance to reshape that perception.

Cilantro itself can be reshaped to make it easier to take. A Japanese study published in January suggested that crushing the leaves will give leaf enzymes the chance to gradually convert the aldehydes into other substances with no aroma.

Sure enough, Ive found cilantro pestos to be lotion-free and surprisingly mild. They actually have deeper roots in the Mediterranean than the basil version, and can be delicious on pasta and breads and meats. If youre looking to work on your cilantro patterns, pesto might be the place to start.

 

[keljonma]

Interesting article. I learned in a cooking class that it is better to roughly chop cilantro instead of finely mincing it. The chef instructor said that finely mincing the herb is what caused it to taste soapy; rough chop never.

 

[Wifezilla]

Hubby thinks is taste soapy. I love it

 

[miss_thenorth]

I just plain don't likre th taste of it. i usd it in salsa before, and it was fine, but plain=gross. Don't recall if it was soapy or not. just gross.

 

[Wannabefree]

I love cilantro! My husband does too. We eat a lot of mexican food!

 

[FarmerDenise]

It tastes different according to how it is grown too.

It is a cool weather crop. Heat gives it a nasty taste.

 

[big brown horse]

I've grown in in the TX summer heat and up here where summer day temps hover around 65-75, I've also minced it, chopped it, and food processor-ed it...it always tastes the same to me--yummy! I eat it at least twice a week in my Thai dishes and homemade Mexican food. Sometimes I just eat it right out of the bunch while I'm cooking.

 

[animalfarm]

I am one who absolutely cannot eat cilantro. Even the most microscopic bit will contaminate an entire dish for me. I would be better off biting off a chunk of soap or drinking dish washing liquid it is so strong. If some one uses a cutting board to cut cilantro and then prepares something else on the same cutting board without washing it, I cannot eat that food. You can blind fold me and it won't matter. It is a nasty experience every time.

For me, it is very difficult to go out to eat since cilantro is now used every where and also as a garnish and regular folk simply cannot understand what the problem is. You can just see the rolling eyeballs.

I would never be able to train myself to eat it and believe me I would if I could, to avoid the many ruined dinners I have ordered. And yes the smell of fresh cilantro is overpowering as well, and I have a very poor sense of smell. If I owned a restaurant, I would never have this on the menu as it is so offensive when someone has the gene. About 10-20% of the population I think; not sure.

 

[MsPony]

*drools* I grew up eating mexican food...chile relleno is like cheeseburger, mmm!!

Bring on the cilantro baby!

 

[Crooked Gate Farm]

Ha! I know this answer! Only because my mom and sister are geeks though. It has to do with where our ancestors came from. Like back in the hunter gatherer times. Say my roots are from the pacific coast and yours are from the east coast. Over here there is something that looks like cilantro but is poison. Over there is just yummy cilantro. My ancestors taste buds developed a soapy taste to be associated with the cilantro to stop us from eating it and dying. Your ancestors taste buds developed a wonderfully awesome taste to keep you eating more of the deliciosity. There is actually a teste that my mom and sis took about this. They put a strip of disingrating paper on their tongue three things could happen. One result was no taste, another was a sweet taste and the third was a bitter taste. Each taste signified a different region of origin. My mom and sis both got bitter. My sis told me that it meant we were from Africa. Odd, I know that we have African in our past but my mom is from Puerto Rico. I guess the genetics is a bit of a mutt there. So if you can't eat cilantro blame your genetics. Don't worry, I'll eat some for you.