Why Italy Fell Out of Love with Cilantro | Hacker News Reader

Why Italy Fell Out of Love with Cilantro

atlasobscura.com

177 pointspepys230 comments

> In 1544, physician and botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli described the leaves as smelling like bed bugs or stink bugs...

Incredible that neither this, nor the other linked article, even mention the fact that this stink-bug/soap taste is genetically predetermined for some people [1], so above quote can by no means be taken as an argument that cilantro "became unfashionable" so authors started describing it negatively.

Instead, the real story is probably much more interesting, as the changes in cilantro popularity could probably be connected to waves of migrations and general genetic pool changes in a particular place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OR6A2

This is very interesting! According to the article, the gene makes people either like cilantro or hate it entirely. I used to hate cilantro in my childhood as it smelled exactly like a stink bug to me. But it's the opposite in my adulthood. Cilantro enhances the savory taste, both in its raw and cooked form.

It's not entirely accurate. I used to hate cilantro (tried it first as an adult), as it does smell kind of soapy, but it grew on me. It's part of the taste for something like a thai curry. I recently planted one and thought it smelled great when I was watering it, soapy or not.

Basil can also smell a bit like cat pee, but it's still great on some things.

Whoever says it tastes "kinda soapy" is likely do not have that gene variant in the first place. Because if you have it, it tastes like soap, full stop. Like you bite into a soap bar. Even a tiny bit of cilantro.

Yeah, but soap doesn't taste that bad either.

Or maybe I've just gotten so used to awful taste that I can ignore. It's just bitter*.

* I'm not sure if bitter is the correct word. In my native language we use the word "bitter" for things like beer, but there's another word for the sharper taste of soap, but they both seem to be translate to "bitter" in English. Maybe acrid is a better word?

I've never bitten into a bar of soap so I can't say.

I don’t even like to be in the same room as a decent amount of cilantro.

The first time I had cilantro was as an adult, and I hated it. It tasted like dish soap.

Now I actually crave it a little on specific dishes: enchiladas, burritos, banh mi, and Pad Thai.

But I wouldn't want dish soap in those dishes (I think). And I don't like it on its own.

It's fascinating how our perception of different food can change over time

To be honest that is one of the most repeated "TIL" I see on the internet, so I was happy to not have to read it again!

I agree that it's refreshing for an article on cilantro to not be about that. But they make some very misleading implications by completely ignoring it.

What implications?

Full quote:

> Coriander leaves fell even further out of fashion than the seeds because their distinct flavor clashed with the trendy imported ingredients of the time, such as rosewater. In 1544, physician and botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli described the leaves as smelling like bed bugs or stink bugs, a comparison echoed by later authors.

I read this as "Cilantro fell out of fashion due to it's incompatibility with other popular flavors at a time, and since people love following recent trends, they started describing it in a negative way". In other words, people saw it as "stink-bug-like" because the fashion changed. This happens a lot with food (e.g. Jell-O texture now being repulsive to a lot of people) but in this case, it has nothing to do with fashion, because to a lot of people cilantro does actually have such taste, and this shift in popularity is much better explained by the shift in genetics.

But that’s your implication the genetic change was widespread enough to effect an entire cultural change. What evidence is there of that?

No, I am just saying that the article is omitting a very important fact that would go against the argument it implies. I am not saying that it was necessarily genetically driven, I am simply saying that I find it strange that this other perspective was not even mentioned, especially since this genetic predisposition to disliking cilantro is such a widely known fact, and since the author they cite chose to describe cilantro in exactly the way everyone with this genetic predisposition (including myself) chooses to describe it.

If an article about the lack of dairy in east Asian cuisine never mentioned the high frequency of lactose intolerance in those regions, it would be equally misleading, even if there were many other factors resulting in this lack of dairy (primarily different agricultural practices).

… I mean, coriander leaves (cilantro) was barely a thing at all in Ireland 50 years ago, and is now all over the place, primarily as a component of Indian and Mexican food, which are quite popular. I’m going to bet on fashions/familiarity, there, rather than a spate of sneaky gene therapy.

It really is one of the most annoying facts posted on the internet. I really should compile a list and make an extension to block comments mentioning them.

> the changes in cilantro popularity could probably be connected to waves of migrations and general genetic pool changes in a particular place

It's not impossible, but without data it's pure conjecture. The first study I found isn't particularly supportive, unless there's been massive immigration from East Asia that I'm not aware of: https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/20...

Well, half of my friends like cilantro, the other half say it tastes like dish soap. I'm in Italy and by the way I'm sowing it today (too late, probably.)

It's an acquired taste plus you have to use it with the right meals. Can't imagine good chunk asian meals without it. Same like disliking onion and garlic.

I think you may have falsely pattern matched this particular reference. I love the taste and smell of cilantro and eat it all the time, but the first time I encountered a stink bug I thought "oh, it smells like cilantro".

It doesn't taste like soap to me. I think the stink bug-smell has no relation to the soap-taste, which is indeed caused by that gene. I think stink bugs' scent probably smells similar to cilantro for everyone without that gene.

This is very interesting, thanks for pointing it out! I really dislike cilantro, and to me it always tasted strongly like stink-bugs (not that I ever tried eating one...). I never really understood the dish-soap reference though.

So if this is correct, then the whole point of my original post is completely wrong. I'll have to look into this further.

It definitely some kind of spectrum of response, rather than just either or.

Cilantro to me isn’t something I would generally describe as soapy. If it’s real heavy there can be a slight soap aftertaste that comes through, though at that point the cilantro essence itself is just too much.

I do find the comparison of the essence of cilantro as similar to stinkbugs a bit more apt. There’s this hard to describe chemical smell that some insects give off that isn’t cilantro exactly, but is in some sort of similar class. Kind of how we group sour things together.

I can tolerate some cilantro without noticing much, but if it’s heavy in a dish it’ll become repulsive and ruin it. For me it’s fine when treated like a spice, not a salad.

Apparently Methoxypyrazines are found in stinkbugs and cilantro, and are responsible for a lot of “vegetal” smells.

Likewise it seems that stinkbugs can give of “trans-2-dodecenal” [0] which I guess can be written as “(E)-2-dodecenal” (I am not a chemist) which is found in cilantro and has a chemical citrus peel type of smell. [1]

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359322168_Expressio...

[1] http://www.thegoodscentscompany.com/data/rw1005071.html

From the first time I was exposed to cilantro I thought it smelled like stink bugs. I don't really get the soap taste but I rarely eat enough to really experience that, either. Oddly, I liked coriander seeds long before I was exposed to the herb. They have a very different taste to me.

I would tend to agree. Cilantro does not smell like bugs to me. It does however taste like soap. So I always tell restaurants no cilantro and often end up having to pick it out of dishes that I didn't expect to contain it.

For me, when I first tried cilantro, it tasted like soap also. This was when my wife and I discovered street tacos several years ago. As time went by and I used hot sauce to mask the cilantro, I developed a taste for it and now I don't mind it at all. I no longer taste soap, but a kind of sweetness.

Oh, that's interesting. I recall reading something years ago about how humans typically don't like brassicas because the bitterness is overwhelming. But through regular introduction the tastebuds have a form of plasticity (I forget the actual term) to them and they'll eventually overcome the bitterness.

I wonder if the "cilantro tastes like soap" is a similar phenomenon.

Modern cultivars produce less of the glucosinolates that give brussel sprouts their bitterness. I'm not sure whether there has been a similar change in other brassicas, but sprouts were the most notoriously bitter and now actually are less bitter than they were in the 70s.

Here's one version of that backstory:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/10/30/773457637/fr...

Sounds like childhood taste preference against bitterness changes with susceptibility to alkaloids [1].

I disliked cilantro for the same reason as a child, and I still have an aversion to cruciferous vegetables because of the saliva compound that makes them taste objectionable (they're also being bred to contain less sulfur, so Brussels sprouts today probably are better than you might remember them being). I can detect a very low threshold of even the mildest cabbage in anything, which has made me a target for Korean women throughout my life.

Tasting like soap doesn't mean you can't enjoy cilantro, though, and while I still don't favor the fresh leaves plain, I use them liberally as an ingredient and dry fry them with the stems for my Sichuan and Mexican cooking.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4654709/

I had something like this with potatoes but with texture not taste. I was in a situation where I had to eat potatoes, I powered through ate them slowly and that aversion evaporated for me after that. I'd feel a gag reflex from mashed potatoes, baked wasnt easy either. I'm insulin dependent and in the 1980's I took my whole insulin dose first thing in the morning. This made skipping meals, let alone delaying them difficult. But maybe that from a gene that causes it by a reflex. My mom didn't like beans her entire life, same issue different starchy food, she was fine with potatoes.

Harold McGee (the food scientist) seems to think so:

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

It tastes like soap due to genetics, but one of the times this came up on reddit someone commented that they think it tastes like soap but they enjoy it anyway, so clearly there are at least a few people who taste soap and still enjoy it.

>It does however taste like soap. So I always tell restaurants no cilantro and often end up having to pick it out of dishes that I didn't expect to contain it.

Same. I don't I've ever actually smelled cilantro, I just taste it in stuff and it tastes like soap. I'll have to make a point of smelling it next time we have some in the house I guess. So many restaurants now think throwing cilantro in everything is some cheat code for making dishes taste fresh and original that they add it to all sorts of stuff. Long before I knew about the cilantro tastes like soap thing, I assumed some restaurants just weren't good about washing the soap off their plates and cups. I knew I was tasting soap but had no idea where it was coming from.

I love coriander. I didn't like it when I first encountered it and if pressed would have probably adopted any negative description of it. I doubt I would have described it as soap-like[herbalessence] or stink buggy without being "primed" though. I don't know where you get your stink bugs from, maybe stink bugs vary around the world[daftpunk]?

I'm not disputing the genetic thing here, by the way. It's just interesting in general and in how knowledge of the fact changes how people talk about taste[sense].

When people like the flavour, they can generally just do so. You can say "I like coriander" without justification, but "I hate coriander" is a statement that requires justification (apparently).

Wikipedia's explanation tells me that the flavour of coriander is actually -- chemically -- like soap in some sense, it's just that there's a genetic variation that determines if you like that or not. Citation needed, of course.

Maybe the flavour of coriander is actually like soap. And the people who like coriander are simply the people who like soap? Anyone who denies the similarity between the two is lying because they don't want to be seen as a soap-muncher.

Soap-muncher.

[herbalessence] Which soap anyway? As I'm sure you know, most "soap" today isn't what people called "soap" decades ago. Maybe some people even have coriander scented soap.

[daftpunk] All the stink bugs I know live along the eastern coast of Australia.

[sense] Taste here means both what food tastes like and general having of preferences with or without reasoning.

On the one hand, I think hate vs like does require some sort of justification. You can like something without really caring, but hate means that you REALLY care.

I can barely tolerate cilantro, because I grew up with it in salsas and sauces. At the same time I can and will pick 1mm specks out of a sauce, if there aren't very many. Many people who "like" cilantro, often don't even notice it's presence, while I will immediately notice even tiny amounts. People confuse it for parsley? Bleagh!

I had never heard the stink bug smell correlation, and though I agree it is similar, the strong soapy stevia like taste is just much worse compared to the smell, which I can tolerate.

Mind if I ask, how did you encounter the taste of a soap?? It boggles my mind, can there be so many people tasting soap?

I don't remember when's the last time I tasted soap, but it's just something you don't forget.

At least in one of my chem classes we where taught bases vs acids and we definitely tasted soap then.

Also, showering.

I do. It was around 1955 when I was 7 years old. I said a bad word and my mother literally took a bar of soap and shoved it in my mouth. I still vividly recall how horrible it tasted and felt.

Ever not rinsed a glass enough after washing it?

Ever had beer?

It tastes like you didn't rinse all the dish soap out of a glass, surely you've experienced that at some point in your life, probably more often if you've ever hand washed dishes.

That's fair enough, I probably should have contrasted 'love' vs. 'hate'. The difference in magnitude wasn't intentional.

I meant to point out that the negative is more often treated as "wrong" or something to fix while the positive is more often simply accepted. I think this is true in general, at least in western/english conversation. But the coriander conversation is notable because apathy or plain dislike for the flavour can be "backed up" with the definitely true genetic explanation. Although in that sense, you actually "can't not like coriander".

As an aside, why add footnotes with misc words/brands rather than numbers?

It's a fun style of writing OP probably grew up reading, Terry Pratchett is a good example. They're asides.

Happy to answer, I hope this quick list will be satisfactory despite its messiness:

- numbers make the order (more) significant, making reordering the text more costly

- compared to numbers, words are often easier to spot and jump to

- compared to numbers, the words have some connection to the point (not saying I do this perfectly!) so you don't have to remember which (number) footnote you were looking for

- ADHD

- herbalessence because coriander is a herb, and Maybe some people even have coriander scented soap

- daftpunk because 'Around the World (around the world)'

> compared to numbers, words are often easier to spot and jump to

Symbols I'd agree with, but words blend together the same way numbers do for me. Words just aren't visually distinctive enough.

Long live *, †, and ‡!

Thank you! I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on with the bracketed words.

I didn't try very hard, because the post was already heavy down voted and I thought maybe there just wasn't much sense to be made of it, but I'm glad someone explained.

Suffice it to say I would rather deal with numbers out of order than random words.

> I doubt I would have described it as soap-like[herbalessence] or stink buggy without being "primed" though.

I thought this way until a few days ago, when I smelled some new soap in the shower and the thought popped unbidden into my head, "Man, this smells like cilantro!"

> Wikipedia's explanation tells me that the flavour of coriander is actually -- chemically -- like soap in some sense [...]

> Maybe the flavour of coriander is actually like soap [...]

What the Wikipedia article says is that coriander contains some aldehydes, which some people find to taste like soap, based on genetics. I tried to find whether the taste of actual soap is also caused by the same aldehydes. As far as I can tell, there's no chemical link. Soap has different chemical compounds, which most people seem to identify as "taste of soap", regardless of their appreciation for coriander.

Also, based on the reported percentages, it's literally abnormal (i.e. not in the norm) to taste soap in coriander. That easily explains why someone would need to justify their distaste for it. Up until 10 years ago, I had never heard of this coriander/soap relation, so the first person I encountered with this predisposition was met with puzzlement. Then I met another, and now before adding coriander to a dish, I make sure that everyone agrees with it.

For me, it tastes like dish soap specifically, like if you swirled a little dish soap into a glass of water. I always assumed the local Mexican food place just had bad dish rinsing practices until I learned that cilantro was responsible for the flavor.

Is the stink bug smell thing a different gene than the taste gene? Cilantro just tastes like another leafy vegetable to me. Sure it's unique but zero negative anything. I had a pile of it yesterday at a Mexican restaurant. I've had cilantro salad at several restaurants in Japan as well.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%83%91%E3%82%AF%E3%83%81%...

I think MinuteFood settled it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZtPynXsFas

I am guessing that stink bug can be categorized with bitter almonds, formaldehyde, and ammonia: Scent analogies that are not as universal as their users imagine!

I know how stink bugs smell and I know how cilantro smells. Never once did I think that they smelled like each other. Could it be a difference in stink bugs? Also, never has it ever tasted like soap to me.

There are several types of stink bugs, and they don't all smell the same. It's the brown marmorated stink bug that smells like cilantro.

To be specific, it has some of the exact same chemical compounds in it, trans-2-decenal and trans-2-octenal.

Where I live there are a lot of brown marmorated stink bugs. I also have never thought they smell like cilantro.

Stink bug scent does not smell similar to cilantro to me, and I happen to be a person for which cilantro tastes like a bar of soap. Stink bug smell is typically closer to a pungent marijuana for me, but different enough to tell the difference. Every year, we get quite a few in the house, so I can recognize the smell quickly. However, my wife reports a different category of scent from stink bugs.

I wonder if the genetics responsible for making me taste soapy cilantro are responsible for altering any other scents/tastes.

I think the "it was native and abundant so nobody used it because it didn't demonstrate wealth" explanation is far more plausible given that the same can be observed with many native plants and spices in other parts of Europe.

TFA mentions that spices were categorized as "sweet or strong" and given that coriander was seen as "strong" it competed with fancier imports. This preference likely "trickled down" making the spice seem less appealing to the masses, especially with increased social mobility in more recent history.

I think a hunk of ginger in some food tastes like soap.

I vaguely remember reading something similar about stevia.

Anecdotally, I know some people who think it's a tasty sweetener, but for me it just tastes bitter and awful. When I add it to coffee, it ends up tasting like I added a mixture of Splenda and powdered graphite.

Isn't Splenda also a sweetener? Or is Stevia supposedly so much better that you're saying to you it tastes like a worse sweetener plus graphite, or something?

I think they're saying it does the job of making it taste sweet (artificially anyway) but comes with an unpleasant flavour.

Right - that's what I was getting at.

I find stevia tastes like what I'd get if I took that wood + yellow paint + HB graphite taste I used to get when I absentmindedly chewed the end of my pencil in elementary school and then mixed in some Splenda.

Stevia in its pure form is quite bitter and awful. The stevia sweetened products you get are chock full of bitter blockers. Some people still tolerate it better than others.

I'm not sure if there's a genetic link or if it's just what you're used to.

I really tied to adopt stevia into my diet, gave it several months, however the rumbling in my stomach turned me away from it. I also experienced some discomfort in the upper intestinal area. When I looked up stevia before trying it, there were warnings some could experience these symptoms.

Seems like most Americans here (and many Westerners) don't know about Luo Han Guo (monk fruit). Most chemical sweeteners and Stevia have this plastic-ky taste to me.

I keep hearing this, but my personal experience refutes this. I first encountered cilantro at the age of 15 and I immediately thought my soup bowl has unwashed soap in it. I did not eat cilantro-included dishes for years after, but fast forward 2 decades and I love cilantro now. I can't really detect the soapyness that once bothered me so much.

I don't think cilantro preferences are as set in stone as the story alludes.

I hope not. I can't stand cilantro. Even a tiny amount renders food completely inedible to me. I wouldn't say it tastes like soap to me (although the first time I heard that, I understood). It tastes more like strongly-flavored dust.

I hate this fact because cilantro has become fashionable and has made eating out into a bit of a gamble. I'd be thrilled if I started liking it, or at least stopped hating it so much.

I'm so confused.

Is this whole thread about fresh cilantro leaves/stems, as I thought?

Or the ground form of its seeds which is totally different and generally called coriander? (At least in the US.)

Just because I've never heard of anyone refer to any kind of leaf as tasting like "dust".

And I thought the "soapy" thing was exclusively a reaction to the leaves, not ground coriander.

Where I'm from we call the leaves coriander too.

Are you in the US? Just curious if there's regional variation in e.g. supermarket labeling.

Because if you look at nationwide labeling, cilantro seems to refer exclusively to the leaves, and coriander exclusively to the seeds, and I've never seen anything different within the US:

https://www.target.com/s?searchTerm=cilantro

https://www.target.com/s?searchTerm=coriander

https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/search?text=cilantro

https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/search?text=coriander

And if both terms can be used for the leaves, is there anywhere that calls the ground seeds cilantro?

No I'm in Europe. In the Netherlands we call the fresh herb coriander too, the term Cilantro doesn't exist. I think it's the same in Spain though it's a bit murkier there due to many Mexican restaurants calling it Cilantro.

I think in Ireland they called everything coriander too though i don't recall exactly. But I'd never heard the term Cilantro till i went to a Mexican restaurant in Spain :)

Yep, in Ireland it's coriander leaves and coriander seeds.

Spanish guy here. The standard name is cilantro, used for both the seeds and the leaves. The Mexicans got the name from us, not the other way :P

However, I have seen the opposite situation, Mexican people calling the seeds "coriandro", probably due to USA influence.

I believe we in the US picked up the term "cilantro" for the leaves and "coriander" for the seeds from Mexico, not the other way around.

But I couldn't quickly find an online reference clarifying this either way. So I don't know.

Sorry, I wrote my comment early in the morning and I didn't explain myself clearly.

"Coriander" was the standard English word, and "cilantro" the standard Spanish word, way before the European arrival to the Americas.

My understanding is that American English got the word "cilantro" for the leaves from Mexican cuisine... and then Mexican Spanish did the opposite and took the word "coriandro" for the seeds from English, to differentiate between the leaves and the seeds. I don't know how common the word is though; I have never been to Mexico so don't take my word for it.

However, European English and Spanish still use just one word each. If you ask me, I will say "hojas de cilantro" (leaves) and "semillas de cilantro" (seeds). It is not so common in our cuisine, so there is no need to have different words.

> the term Cilantro doesn't exist.

Agreed. (Brit here.)

It's all "coriander." By default the term refers to the leaves, and if you meant the seeds you'd specify "coriander seeds". I didn't learn the Americanism "cilantro" until I was an adult.

I was quite confused when following an Indian cookbook, which kept referring to "fresh coriander." I tried to find it at the store, with no luck. But I can buy cilantro, no problem (:

Apparently "chinese parsley" is another term for it, perhaps less common now (haven't heard that in a while).

I'm talking about the leaves, cilantro. Coriander, the seeds, are completely different and taste fine.

I think a better description of the taste for me is that it tastes like stink bugs smell (which to me is strongly reminiscent of old dust, which is how I thought of it before I smelled a stink bug).

Reading the other comments, I didn't realize calling the leaves "cilantro" wasn't universal. My apologies for the confusion!

As supertasters get older, the cells lining your sinus and pharynx senesce which is why you aren't so bothered by cilantro and other related vegetables any more. That's the medical theory and BTW there is some evidence that the cells serve innate immune defenses against viruses.

Harold McGee, the food scientist, would agree:

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

>I first encountered cilantro at the age of 15 and I immediately thought my soup bowl has unwashed soap in it.

Until I figured out it was cilantro, I always assumed the local Mexican place was bad at rinsing their dishes. I still hate the flavor. No doubt some people with the soap gene can learn to enjoy it though. Anytime I comes up, someone that clearly tastes soap will mention that they like it anyway.

It's weird, I find the taste really fresh and fruity <3

People take genetic determinism way too seriously, and that original "Why Cilantro Tastes Like Soap" NYT article has been aggressively misused to justify a generation of picky eaters. It's tragic how many people miss out on an incredible food because they believe it is their genetic destiny to never like it.

That genetic predisposition only really matters for your first exposures to cilantro. I used to abhor the taste and found if completely vile, but after having more friends from cilantro heavy cultures I kept trying it, and trying it and trying it.

It went from horrid to okay, and the from okay to one of my favorite tastes. You don't need "general genetic pool changes" in order for cilantro to become more widely adopted, you just need enough people who like it to encourage those who initially don't to give it a few more tries.

If you're someone who genuinely likes exploring new foods and flavors and have let that silly article convince you that you are doomed to never enjoy cilantro, keep exploring, you'll find reward. If you're a picky-eater, that's fine, just tone down on the genetic determinism.

I'm sure most people's reaction to the discovery that cilantro taste is genetically determined simply think "Oh, so I'm not crazy for disliking it" and they move on in life rather than lean heavy into genetic determinism like you claim.

This kinda seems like you giving yourself too hardy of a pat on the back for grinding cilantro.

> It went from horrid to okay, and the from okay to one of my favorite tastes.

On the one hand, congratulations, it's good to develop a palate for something even if you're operating on hard mode.

On the other hand, and I can't emphasize this enough, I have always found cilantro delicious, even as a young child. There are tastes I've acquired through diligence, olives for example, but cilantro? Never, I love the stuff.

The genetic propensity here is real.

The issue of if cilantro tastes like soap, weather that be genetic or not, we can't ignore that if cilantro was common at the time, people would have grown up eating it, and would have been used to the taste.

There also was likely less concept of individual preference in the food you ate. The food was made for the family, and you either ate it, or you didn't eat.

Even I had to live through this with boiled brussel sprouts as a kid.

> so above quote can by no means be taken as an argument that cilantro "became unfashionable" so authors started describing it negatively.

It can be if the person who was genetically predetermined to dislike the taste was influential. I agree that this interpretation would require additional evidence to presume, but the above quote certainly does not preclude such a possibility.

Most importantly, much of culture is determined by taste outside of genetic disposition. I don't see much reason to see this scenario as removed from the influence of culture.

My wife and I stayed in a hotel once which we later discovered was infested with bed bugs. We were thankfully able to prevent spreading them to our home by running everything through a very hot dryer multiple times and thorough inspection of our luggage.

I love cilantro but that room absolutely smelled like it.

It also smelled like my best friend growing up's house, which I commented on when we first entered the room after checking in. I had always assumed the smell was from their foreign cuisine, but I have been curious since this experience if they perhaps had a bedbug problem.

In general, most cuisines and culinary trends are far more modern than we tend to assume. Until the last 3-ish centuries:

Italy didn't have tomatoes or basil. Nor was there corn for polenta. India didn't have chilies. The Irish and Germans didn't have potatoes.

> The Irish and Germans didn't have potatoes.

True, but fwiw I wouldn't consider potato to be particularly important in German cuisine. Sure you'll see it used quite a bit, but many of the more iconic dishes don't really need them or can be replaced like with bread dumplings for instance.

The more east you go from Germany, the more important potatoes are to general population. Especially in the past, but even now they are more popular as side dish compared to ie rice or pasta, maybe due to bigger 'filling the stomach' effect that also lasts longer.

Also rice doesn't grow anywhere near Germany. Today that's not really s factor anymore, because it's so easy to shop, but my parents both grew up sticking very much to a local and seasonal approach to cooking, because everything else was new to them. They eat what they always knew best, so 5-6 days of the week the starchy side were potatoes. Rice is way more filling by transportation effort, but potatoes have been around their entire lives and in my dad's case also what his parents grew on their farm.

On a related note: German beans are different. You'll find canned kidney beans everywhere because combining them with sweet corn, bell peppers and onions with a seasoning overpowered by vinegar is a popular cheap side salad (often called "Mexico salad") and you'll find Heinz beans in tomato sauce but otherwise it's white beans or green beans.

I was happy to discover canned pinto beans at my local supermarket but they were only available in a hot tomato sauce (branded as "chilli beans") - I only just found out the overpriced exotic Italian Wachtelbohnen collecting dust in the shelf next to them are pinto beans too.

Heck, I'm nearly 40 and I've met Germans my age who were intrigued (or put off) by couscous because it's so exotic and they've never tried it before. I've talked to people running kebab joints (Dönerbuden) who said that they stopped offering lamb meat because the Germans didn't buy it and the few Turkish and Arab people who frequented them weren't enough to justify the overhead.

What German did you meet, that didnt know couscous? Granted, im a fair bit younger, but all of my friends and family know couscous and eat it fairly regularly (im german too). Which is to say: couscous is very well known in germany in general

> couscous is very well known in germany in general

I take it you live in a city. When I lived in Cologne, everyone obviously knew couscous. Rural Germany is a very different place. Granted, this was like 10 years ago but there's a reason we have the saying Was der Bauer nicht kennt, frisst er nicht ("what the peasant doesn't know, he doesn't eat").

Just on a practical note, if you're looking to buy dry beans in Germany, every Turkish supermarket has a whole aisle dedicated to them. You can get a couple dozen kinds of dry beans there, including pinto. Most organic grocery stores have them too, but for 3x the price.

Potatoes play a major role in german cuisine, a fact that you can also observe through architecture by looking at old houses or farms in Germany: The "Kartoffelkeller" (="potato cellar") is a common storage room under a house with no windows/light, for long term storage of potatoes after the harvest. Often there would be slides under trapdoors to be accesible from outside the house, so you can fill the cellar with the potato harvest right from the tractor. People would get their basements filled to have enough potatoes to make it through the winter.

Another cultural fact: "Kartoffelferien" (="potato holidays") are still used by some elderly to describe the school holidays around october, because children needed to help with the potato harvest around that time.

Yes, they can be substituted but they're definitely a staple in good German Hausmannskost. Maybe not so much in the South: Swabia subsists almost entirely on Spätzle noodles and Bavarians seem to prefer various kinds of Knödel.

But a good Rhineland Sauerbraten for example would normally be served with potatoes and a good Bauernomelette demands some crispy fried potato slices as well. Semmelknödel (but also often offered alongside potato dumplings) are a more common sight at special occasions or buffets. Many a young family's weekly rotation features spinach, fried eggs and potato mash alongside fish sticks, fried potatos with fried eggs and onions are a popular hearty lunch or late breakfast, and cooked potatos or mash are the default addition to some meat or sausage to the point a common microwave TV dinner still consists of Nuremberg sausages, sauerkraut and mash.

> Yes, they can be substituted but they're definitely a staple in good German Hausmannskost. Maybe not so much in the South: Swabia subsists almost entirely on Spätzle noodles and Bavarians seem to prefer various kinds of Knödel.

While the classic northern "Salzkartoffeln" are basically non existent in Swabia, potatoes in general play a big role in traditional Swabian cuisine. Whether its "Schupfnudeln" (finger noodles), as salad, Knödel, fried potatoe slices, Hitzkuchen/Blootz/Dinnete (Pizza with potatoes instead of tomatoe/cheese), Kachelessen/Griebaschnecken/Schlanganger (various potatoe and milk dishes), Gaisburger Marsch (stew), "sour eggs" (potatoes and eggs in a vinegar sauce).

But unfortunately most of those dishes are not really cooked anymore. (For "sour eggs" thats a good thing, this tasteless sour graybrown dish can die in hell for all I care.)

In 2012 I was on the Tyrol valley near the Austrian Italian border, and IIRC the small restaurant we visited had potato pizza on its menu.

As a fellow southern German - is it really surprising? Pretty much all traditional dishes are just so heavy, there’s only about two days of fall when I’m in the mood to eat anything like that. Also, pretty much any traditional German main course is meat-based.

You forgot Kartoffelsalat, which is a traditional dish both in Bavaria and Swabia (and beyond).

Of course. Kartoffelsalat is a staple in most parts of Germany and especially popular with barbecues.

Your list now makes me want to try to cook some german dishes! Thanks!

I tried to find some data, and I have to say I'm surprised how low potato consumption is in Germany[1]: 59 kg per capita per year. Metaphorically unfocusing my eyes while looking at the linked map, that seems like it's about average for Europe.

Another, more recent, statistic[2] bears this out, 54 kg, and also has surprising (to me) details. Of those 54 kg, fully two-thirds -- 38 kg -- are processed potatoes (the article names potato chips/crisps, ready-to-eat potato salad and, of course, fries) and just 16 kg are "real" fresh potatoes.

Finally, things used to be different[3]: in 1950, the per-capita consumption was 186 kg!

[1] https://landgeist.com/2021/12/21/potato-consumption-in-europ... attributed to FAO

[2] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung/versorgungsbilanzen... German dept. of agriculture

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/539799/per-capita-consum... it doesn't say, but I doubt people were eating a lot of potato chips in 1950 Germany

A contributing factor in that is that Germans eat less and less traditionally German food. I'm wondering if fries are counted among the processed potatoes (I suspect so), as those are seemingly – like in many places – the most commonly observed form of potatoes.

The fact that per-capita potato consumption was so much higher in 1950 tracks with what I've observed from german-american areas in the US. I lived in wisconsin for a bit and grew up as/around a lot of German-Americans, and we consumed way more potatoes than seems typical compared to eg San Franciscans. Potato salad, potato pancakes, potato soup, potato dumplings, german fried potatoes, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes (the latter two not being exclusively german but much more consumed), potatoes au gratin/scalloped potatoes +/- ham (I guess has some French origin as well).

Also notable is that a lot of dishes that seem popular in Germany when I went aren't very common in the US in german-american areas as far as I can tell. Spaetzle is basically just a novelty, and I never see schnitzel per-se, but we do have equivalents like chicken-fried steak. We also basically never use the German name for anything except sauerkraut, bratwurst, and strudels, which to my understanding is because the US heavily de-germanized in WW1.

Yeah, I always find this fact + people saying "America" has no unique food culture to be quite funny in tandem.

Of course the United States does have unique food culture beyond that juxtaposition, but still.

But its true.

Europe has a refined food history even if certain foods are young. There was some type of pizza before and it evolved in what pizza is today.

Alone the amount of cheese types is huge.

What did the USA invent in comparision? What is specific to USA? Even plenty of typical USA Food was invented in Europe.

What is there to "invent" exactly?

First of all, humans invent recipes based on the locally available raw foods, nothing special about that. Secondly, humans reinvent the same recipes time after time because we are all the same. Each culture invents their own stuffed dumplings, flat bread with toppings, etc. and they believe it's soooo unique and local

Your strokes are too broad.

Obviously different groups of humans in different times and locations are going to invent similar foods. But, for example speaking of flat bread, how you actually execute it and the differences in texture, thickness, crunchiness, what you put on top of it and what order can make two dishes that are the same macro idea but end up as two completely different things.

Cooking something for 15 minutes more or 15 minutes less can cause massive differences in texture and taste, and we are not even talking about the potentially big differences that having slightly different ingredients can cause.

So, you are saying I'm right. A steak tartare otherwise could be the same dish as an hamburger with egg and mustard, following the line of thought of your previous comment.

You are right, but at the same time your rightness doesn't serve your argument. Recipes can be dramatically different without anyone even putting a crumb of cretivity, just out of pure coincidence

And curiously most older cultures have their own fermented food.

Yep! Fermented foods have been a cornerstone of traditional diets in many cultures (Kimchi)

> What did the USA invent in comparision? What is specific to USA? Even plenty of typical USA Food was invented in Europe.

Low and slow style BBQ

Barbeque originated in the Caribbean

Oh they were the first to cook meat on fire were they. /s

The regional BBQ culture of different sauces and meats in the US has nothing to do with what the word was used to describe in the Caribbean. What was described as BBQ hundreds of years ago in the Caribbean, as a way of cooking fish, wouldn't even be considered BBQ in the US.

> What did the USA invent in comparison?

Well, there’s California cuisine: https://guide.michelin.com/sg/en/article/features/california...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tex-Mex would be an obvious candidate?

I'm not sure how you'd make a claim like "plenty of typical XYZ food was invented elsewhere" when all food is similar to or a variation of or build upon something that came before unless we literally evolve new ways of ingesting nutrients.

> What did the USA invent in comparision?

Clamato juice?

Canadians have elevated Clamato juice with the Caesar, the purest nectar of the gods. Mexicans come close with micheladas and Americans have bloody Mary’s but nothing compares to a proper Caesar.

I think I might need to have one today.

Cajun cuisine and multiple types of BBQ come to mind.

Breakfast cereals, hot dogs, hamburgers, toaster pastries, hot pockets, cornbread, jambalaya, grits, cranberry sauce, jerky, the chocolate chip cookie, pumpkin pie, the waffle ice cream cone, milkshakes, Coca-cola, peanut butter (although I learned today the first peanut butter patent was issued to a Canadian in Montreal).

Some of these were invented in North America, but before the USA was founded. If you do some research you can find much more.

It amounts to a considerable contribution to the culinary arts. Chocolate chip cookies alone are worthy of a lifetime achievement award.

Louisiana really is this country's best kept secret.

While most of the others sound North American, jerky is not. Dried meat is a pretty universal concept, and jerky specifically is something Europeans got from the Inca. Even the word itself is borrowed from Quechua.

Thanks!

> Dried meat is a pretty universal concept

Irrelevant in my opinion. Putting something on bread has probably existed since the day after someone invented bread. But we still give Italy credit for inventing pizza. Just like startups, the implementation is more important than the idea.

Early version of hot dog was invented in germany Hamburger might also been created in germany

Cornbread: Native Americans

I give you breakfast cereals, toaster pastries, hot pockets, grits, pumpkin pie, milkshake.

Coca-cola? do we now start to listen all types of drink recipetes?

So pure cultural, usa invented easy foods. This has very little to do with cultural foods like cheese, or the million types of sausages and breads and etc.

It does not amount to a considerable contribution to the culinary arts

“American cooks and chefs have substantially altered these dishes over the years, to the degree that the dishes now enjoyed around the world are considered to be American. Hot dogs and hamburgers are both based on traditional German dishes, but in their modern popular form they can be reasonably considered American dishes.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cuisine#Ethnic_influe...

The list of US-specific and US-influenced food is pretty long, and includes lots of ‘slow’ foods. Why are you basing your argument on cherry picking from an incomplete list of examples?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_foods

And what do you mean that so-called ‘easy food’ isn’t a contribution to food culture? It’s trending globally (for better or worse), and relates closely to food supply economics.

> Cornbread: Native Americans

Native American foods count, why wouldn’t they?

> This has very little to do with cultural foods like cheese

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_cheeses

Inventing Coke, toaster pastries, and breakfast cereals was neither quick, nor easy. And drinks are a part of cuisine. If we can't count Coke, we also can't include French wine-making or German brewing.

What's a "cultural food"?

Not that GPs point is particularly convincing, but are we really comparing the mastery of wine making and beer brewing to Coca Cola now, in a discussion on culinary culture..? That’s like comparing Fox News to Tolstoi.

Why not? This is just the whole high art/low art nonsense in another context. Plenty of people enjoy their cola of choice more than they do a fancy wine and consider it to be an essential part of their day. Why is it less worthy of inclusion in culinary culture?

No, it’s not. Wine is not just a fancy drink but a craftsmanship tradition, thousands of years old. It’s not just the sophisticated people drinking it, but also the countless people involved in its making and cultivation! Have you ever been to a vineyard in a French, Italian, or German vineyard wine region? The people there live for this; their yards have been passed on for generations, and will continue to be. Planting a new grape means making a 30 year bet, with that much commitment you have to be all in.

I could go on about the entire villages built around wine, the historic efforts required to get the grapes we have today, the unique chemical compounds making for the aromas, and more.

And you’re telling me you want to seriously compare thousands of years of agricultural tradition to a mere hundred years of stimulating Coca Tonic that accidentally tastes pretty good?

It looks like you just did compare coke to wine. :P Seriously though, isn’t this a straw man argument? Parent wasn’t saying there isn’t craft or tradition involved in wine, nor that coke compares on those axes. You didn’t actually answer the question at all: why not discuss the cultural impact of coke? There is cultural impact. It’s not the same impact wine has, it’s quite different, but it is in fact there, don’t you agree?

I answered this in a sibling comment in more detail, but basically my complaint is that comparing a single soda brand to an entire class of tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of drinks, which have a rich cultural back story just seems wrong to me, that doesn’t do wine justice, especially as we don’t just discuss cultural impact, but cultural significance. I’m sure I come across as a European snob here, and I’m actually sorry for that, but I can’t get over the fact that someone claims Coca Cola is in any way as significant as the tradition of winery in total :(

Nobody claimed Coke is as historically significant as all wines combined. That is the straw man. As the best selling single soda brand, and a major global export that people in almost every country on earth consume, Coke does in fact have global cultural and economic significance, which is just a fact. That fact is not taking anything away from the rich history of winemaking, so there’s no need to be defensive. Have some wine and relax!

Edit: BTW Coca Cola’s revenue does stack up meaningfully against the entire wine industry. (The Google results are all over the map, so I’m being careful with my claims, but according to some web pages out there, Coca-Cola’s net revenue is higher than all wines combined.) There is an economic basis for comparing Coke to wine, which does support a cultural basis for comparison, in addition to other reasons Coke is culturally relevant. Notice I’m not (and upstream comments were not) coming to any conclusions about the result of that comparison.

They're all popular drinks associated with their respective food cultures. That's all. I'm not comparing the skill in manufacturing Coke vs beer or wine.

It’s an apple to fruit comparison, then: More apt would be picking carbonated soda drinks, maybe. Or pick out a single kind of wine from a single vineyard.

I’m just a bit salty on comparing such a giant category like European wine or beer to a single company‘s soda.

Specifically colas as opposed to all carbonated drinks should count.

I don't know if generally all sweetened carbonate drinks are mainly American, but I wouldn't be surprised.

That's fair. Most of the popular soft drinks today were invented in the US - Pepsi, Sprite, Dr. Pepper, 7-up, Slice, Dr. Pepper.

While your list is true, it's not a great list to make your case. One responder said that the hamburger and hotdog don't fit, because they're German, but that's only appreciably true for the hotdog (which is effectively indistinguishable from a bockwurst).

Gumbo, jambalaya, barbecue, cornbread, chili, clam chowder, fried chicken, pancakes, biscuits and gravy, pies (any sweet sort, not just pumpkin), cheesecake, brownies, fudge. The US is also one of the three great pizza countries (along with Italy and Argentina).

And that's just the some of the stuff that's relatively decisively American. In practice, as I said in my original post, things are incredibly fluid, and a lot of American dishes are heavily based on other cultures, and a lot of other cultures' mainstays are based on New World ingredients. American and Italian versions of "Italian" cuisine significantly co-evolved, and it's virtually impossible to separate one from the other.

Fwiw I'm not American and get a good laugh out of /r/shitamericanssay sometimes, but I can think of: 'tex-mex', California roll sushi, deep dish pizza, bagels as sandwiches (I think? Not the bagel itself, but using it as a bun), different uses of okra than I'm aware of elsewhere like stewed/chowders/soup, some of that stuff in the south in general actually spicy shellfish chowders etc. I think there's a good argument is evolved from what came before it elsewhere.

Using "America" to mean the US annoys me too, but blame the Americans for that one.

There are definitely some unique food cultures within the US (cajun/creole comes immediately to mind, as does Chicago pizza), but are there really American food cultures - flavours or preparations that are eaten both throughout the US and not elsewhere? All of the obvious candidates like hamburgers are popular in many countries and cultures; whenever I've gone to an "American restaurant" (as distinct from a "New York deli" or a "New Orleans grill" or what have you) they've seemed to be serving much the same stuff as a generic restaurant.

The requirement that the food be eaten conventionally throughout the country is a really weird definition of what counts as "American food" that would to my first- and secondhand knowledge at the very least exclude Mexican and Italian cuisine from being distinct. Neither one really exists as a coherent cuisine in the way you seem to imagine, and if you talk to a native of those countries they'll very quickly tell you that the foods you think of as "Mexican" or "Italian" are actually from specific regions of those countries.

Your second requirement—that it be not eaten elsewhere—would likewise exclude every major exported food culture. Do the Italians no longer get to claim spaghetti because an American mom makes it as a quick dish at home for her kids?

> would to my first- and secondhand knowledge at the very least exclude Mexican and Italian cuisine from being distinct. Neither one really exists as a coherent cuisine in the way you seem to imagine, and if you talk to a native of those countries they'll very quickly tell you that the foods you think of as "Mexican" or "Italian" are actually from specific regions of those countries.

I don't know Mexico well enough to comment, but yeah there absolutely isn't a unified "Italian" culture (perhaps there is the beginnings of one) and it's a mistake to think of one (not just in food but in other matters as well). Just as there is no "Chinese" food, there are several distinct Chinese food cultures.

> Your second requirement—that it be not eaten elsewhere—would likewise exclude every major exported food culture. Do the Italians no longer get to claim spaghetti because an American mom makes it as a quick dish at home for her kids?

At some point it just becomes generic food yeah, just like trademarks. I'm sure for the first people to bake bread it was a unique cultural food, but it would be madness to call that Mesopotamian food now, it's just food.

I guess you at least have a consistent definition you're working from! My initial pattern matching on your first sentence told me (apparently mistakenly) that this was another anti-US rant that was holding the US to a different standard than the rest of the world.

There are universal, non-regional American dishes, eaten consistently everywhere in the country. Caesar salad, apple pie, fried chicken, chili (though: regional variations), beef stew, a BLT. And then of course there's Americanized ethnic food: pizza, burritos, General Tso's chicken. That's before you dip your toe into fast food.

> There are universal, non-regional American dishes, eaten consistently everywhere in the country. Caesar salad, apple pie, fried chicken, chili (though: regional variations), beef stew, a BLT.

Right, but those are mostly global (or at least broadly western) - I'm interested in the question of whether there's an American food culture. BLT is an interesting thought though, I think America does have a distinct "bacon" culture involving different, more heavily cured meat than you find in Europe.

Those are only universal because they were so successful. The things that are most universal in the US are also the ones that have been the most exported. Hamburgers and fried chicken weren't common in Europe before the US was involved in European wars and reconstruction. Honestly, even finding high-quality hamburgers in Europe outside of the Anglophone countries is something that happened in the last 10-15 years.

There are a lot of things like that -- you find chili in Europe, but you don't ever find good chili. Same with, say, pies. BBQ even less. And zero gumbo. Or fried okra. And so on.

Ooh, here's a fun one! Craft beer. It's pretty interesting watching American beer styles migrate over to Europe.

(I've spent about equal parts of my life in the US and Europe, and am a pretty avid cook.)

Well, you could make the case that the craft beer movement in the US came from European beers: India pale ale is a British invention after all. The "original" American beers (Budweiser & co) haven't made much of a dent on the world.

IPA was significantly revived by west coast US brewers and basically wasn't drunk in the UK at the time it caught on in the US. The modern "craft" (under that name) and explosion of styles and experimentation was very much an American cultural export. Europeans have brewed a lot of styles in regional breweries since forever, but the creative explosion of the last few decades happened in the US.

Comment significantly changed since I replied, so adding:

Actually the original American beers did have a lot of impact. American Adjunct Lagers are brewed in a lot of countries:

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/styles/38/

I don't like them, but they've certainly had a major influence on world beer. Most of the world's 10 most popular beer brands are American Adjunct Lager.

That list takes an awfully broad view of "American Adjunct": despite the self-description "made popular in America after Prohibition", there's plenty of 19th-century brands like Fosters, San Miguel, Sol, Dos Equis etc in there that predate the Prohibition by decades, and thus descend from German pale lagers.

> Those are only universal because they were so successful.

Well, sure, but so what? At the point where something's popular worldwide, to the point that people draw on it without thinking of it as from somewhere else, it's not a cultural thing anymore.

> Ooh, here's a fun one! Craft beer. It's pretty interesting watching American beer styles migrate over to Europe.

Craft beer very much came out of the UK with CAMRA and British traditional ales, American involvement came later. What we have now is very much international with influences in all directions, not an American culture spreading out one way.

You can probably get twice-cooked pork anywhere in Europe and in every city in the US with more than 40,000 people in it (ie: everywhere). But it is absolutely a Sichuan Chinese dish, regardless of its universality.

If you define "true" American cuisine as something that is (a) only eaten in America and (b) eaten consistently throughout America, you've come up with a definition that probably nothing fits. Though: watch the British Bakeoff episode where they attempt brownies, one possible contender.

Lots of stuff is probably only gettable in America! I doubt you can get a good cheese steak, italian beef, po' boy, biscuits & gravy, or scrapple in Europe. But you can't get a good version of all of those in most places in America, too.

> You can probably get twice-cooked pork anywhere in Europe and in every city in the US with more than 40,000 people in it (ie: everywhere).

> [a sentence about caesar salad that disappeared]

Sure. But not at a generic restaurant; you'll have to go to a specifically Chinese restaurant. I guess you could argue that you'd have to go to a western restaurant for Caesar salad, but at least where I am now you'd be more likely to find a Caesar salad in a "european" restaurant than in an "american" one.

I just didn't want the argument about the Americanity of a Caesar salad; it's a quintessential American dish, but Wikipedia would give you fodder to debate. I sort of puckishly thought I was up for that debate, and then thought better of it.

America is huge. There is American food, universal throughout the 50 states, but almost definitionally anything that's 3,000 miles successful is going to be popular outside of the US as well.

>a generic restaurant;

There is no such thing.

I’m fascinated that every American dish you mentioned in this thread aside from (Mexican) Caesar salad is brown. Our food leaves a lot to be desired.

> Nor was there corn for polenta

Before corn, polenta was made with barley: https://historicalitaliancooking.home.blog/english/recipes/a...

In my mind, polenta was just another word for porridge, which means it could be made with literally any available grain.

It's just a roughly milled grain, boiled until a certain consistency.

AFAIK India didn't have corn either. Like chilies and potatoes and a few other plants, it came from the Americas.

And the list goes on of the food products that only existed in the Americas - chocolate, coffee, hot peppers.

But of course it goes both ways. I just had traditional breakfast in an isolated Zapotec village in Mexico. But of course the cheese wasn’t part of it until the Spaniards arrived.

You’re off on coffee, a few months ago I too assumed it came from the Americas because it grows so well here, but was surprised to learn it’s actually an old world thing.

https://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/History-of-Coffee

The name coming from Arabic is a big hint. And then the species called C. arabica.

Coffee came from Ethiopian highlands, according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee

Article on Indian food before modern European contact:

https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/06/25/curry-before-colum...

The article focuses quite a bit on asfoetida, but makes no mention of peppercorns which are native to India. When Europeans sailed to India for spices, they weren't going an asfoetida or turmeric run. It was pepper they sought (and I guess cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves too - though some of those might be from Indonesia idk).

I always assumed pre-Columbian Indian food had fieriness and heat from pepper (bite into a whole peppercorn - it's plenty fiery), so there was a pre-existing cultural affinity for that flavor. This to me explained the rapid assimilation of chilli peppers into virtually every regional Indian cuisine.

also long pepper, which is supposed to be hotter than pepper. called piper longum.

some of the spices you mention were originally from the Malacca area, but were later grown in South India as well.

Cinnamon sugar was a bigger deal than anyone gives a credit for now.

Mace and cloves only grew in the southern moluccas and when the Dutch took over from the Portuguese they genocide the local Melanesian population with the help of some peoples of the western islands.

And interestingly, many of them are from the nightshade family, the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanaceae .

Whats interesting is why nightshades diversified and selectively bred into so many staple plants in the new world but the nightshades in the old world did not.

Black nightshade berries native to Europe are easily mistaken for the latter stages of potato plant development, for example.

As an Indian I definitely find corn out of place in our cuisine. But the others are pretty essential.

Really? Makki ki roti is a pretty key part of Punjabi cuisine.

Huh, didn’t know. Maybe because I’m from South India and the cuisine is pretty different there?

I can’t think of any Indian dishes that use corn.

I can think of two, or at least, one dish and one snack:

dish: makki ki roti (roti made from corn flour) with sarson kaa saag (mustard greens, cooked). this is a very common, even iconic, Punjabi dish. I've only tried it once myself. didn't like the corn roti much. the mustard greens were fine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makki_ki_roti

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarson_ka_saag

snack: whole corn roasted on a fire, i.e. corn on the cob. bhutta in hindi. ubiquitous in india.

Yep bhutta is everywhere but I was referring to corn in dishes. I had no idea makke di roti was corn.

India also didn’t have tomatoes until it was brought over by the Portuguese, at least this is what I learned in my travels there.

It's even harder to imagine India without chillies.

India used black pepper before chillies so things were just as hot. Just a different kind of hot.

putting an extreme amount of black pepper in a dish does not make it unbearably spicy, it just makes it taste way too much like pepper.

theres definitely no way black pepper can be "just as hot" as chillies

You haven't used really hot black peppers then. Also I say black peppers but also people used cloves and bay leaves.

It is a different spice so yeah, it doesn't burn the tongue but just heats up your body.

The history of global cuisines is a testament to the dynamic nature of food culture

Didn't Italy get noodles from Asia relatively recently

No. Common myth. The Romans had pasta.

I'm willing to believe it, but do you have a citation? Google is useless here, too many results for non-ancient Rome, but when I can find one that is properly about the ancients they all claim the same thing: the Romans had things that could be considered pasta-like (pancakes used for a sort of lasagna dish) but those were not actually the ancestors of Italian noodles.

Roger II found pasta factories when he seized control of Sicily: https://italicsmag.com/2020/05/29/a-brief-history-of-pasta/

Again, though: did the various dough concoctions turn into pasta the way that we think of it today, or did modern pasta come from the East? Boiled dough balls and pancakes are a far cry from the thin, stretchy, glutenous noodles that we call pasta.

Don’t forget chocolate and (though it wasn’t a New World plant) vanilla.

Rather than being peculiarly modern, I think probably most cultures have always been much less stable and more changing than we tend to assume, even before modernity.

It seems Christopher Columbus did more for gastronomy than thousands of chefs.

Tomatoes, maize, chillies, and potatoes (3 are nightshade) and came during the Colombian exchange.

Basil has been used across Eurasia for far longer. Certainly a lot earlier than 3 centuries ago. For Millenia in the Mediterranean.

Tomatoes took awhile to take hold, with it not really taking off until the 19th century. I've heard it explained as due to a general distrust of 'exotic' foods and vegetables generally at that time and a belief that it was poisonous and would sap your vitality.

There were lots of similar folk beliefs, such as diseases being related to the resemblance to the food you ate. E.g. potatoes looking like tumours therefore giving you tumours. In Germany they were popularised by Frederick the great putting a cursory guard around a field of them and then letting peasants steal them.

From memory tomatoes were for some time grown as ornament in Europe before they were commonly part of cuisine.

I'm somewhat surprised that the article's list of conjectures didn't include one: that Italian Parsley may have just been viewed as superior for all use cases (which IMHO it kinda is, outside of Mexican recipes.)

Don't forget asian food!

I feel the opposite: Cilantro is superior in all cases except perhaps Italian food, and even Italian food I am skeptical that Cilantro could be better if not for a bias from tradition.

Parsley tastes so bitter and one-dimensional and you have to remove the leaves from the stem, whereas Cilantro is aromatic, fresh, and you can eat the stems making it trivial to prepare. I even go so far as to substitute cilantro for leafy greens in salad.

That's a pretty bonkers statement. Cilantro is much more used worldwide (by about an order of magnitude). They look very similar, but don't taste anything alike. You might as well say basil is better than oregano. It's just not a very meaningful statement.

In a lot of the world flavor is about stacking complex flavors to get a melange of them. With the establishment of the top end of European cooking as French haute cuisine, there was instead an emphasis on simple, clear flavors. In that style, parsley, as a much more subtle herb, shines.

I didn't say they had the same taste (though they're way closer than basil and oregano.) The question is whether the ancient Cilantro recipes that the article posits became Italian Parsley recipes.

Subtlety gets evened out by different preparation techniques. IMHO, when used raw, finely chopped Italian Parsley is at least as intense as coarsely chopped Cilantro.

The article doesn't really answer the "why" part. Basically, it sounds like there were a lot of small things, mostly changing culinary influences. Of course, that doesn't answer the question of why they lost their taste for cilantro but not other herbs. Don't get me wrong, I liked learning the history, but it's a bad headline.

I think it gives the answer but very briefly - "It clashed with expensive foreign spices". Essentially the Italian cuisine that formed wasn't really compatible with coriander.

I like coriander but my general sense is there aren't any Italian dishes I'd want to add it to whereas it's perfect with many Mexican, Indian and Chinese dishes I know of.

I think the article doesn’t do a good job of explaining why coriander wasn’t revived with Italian unification when other “ancient” things were.

“medieval Italians divided spices into two categories: sweet and strong”

it’s funny because german language sometimes has this division as well: süß and pikant ; although pikant in a modern sense means a bit spicy

It's the same in modern Italian: dolce (sweet) and piccante (spicy/strong)

The leaves taste like dishwashing shampoo. But the seeds are great. We mix them with green and black pepper.

Coriander, if you forgot what cilantro is.

In the US coriander typically refers to the seeds, which do not have the offensive flavor of the leaves.

Thank you, I really was lost for a bit.

Cilantro falling out of favor from Ancient Rome is minor compared to Silphium which was an extremely popular Roman plant that went extinct, and nobody today knows what it was. Also Asafoetida, Liquamen, and Garum. Garum production was a large industry in Ancient Rome. Today, while there are some ostensibly traditional fish sauces made in parts of Italy, nobody knows for certain how Garum was made in Ancient Rome or if extant methods are related.

>Silphium which was an extremely popular Roman plant that went extinct

Is that the birth control one? Surprised they never cultivated it, they had basic agriculture back then.

Supposedly it was very finicky and could only be grown in a small region of eastern Libya.

> says Karima Moyer-Nocchi, a culinary historian

What a fascinating profession. In Italy of all places! My guess is they are sought after at cocktail parties.

In Portugal it’s used quite a lot in the south in pork dishes, in a kind of bread soup (açorda) and also in a famous clam dish (bulhão pato-style clams). In the north it was very hard to find until 2 or 3 decades ago, and parsley is used a lot more.

My Italian American family uses a lot of both cilantro and parsley, sometimes mixed together. I think they started shopping at local Mexican butchers for things like tripe and offal and maybe took on some of that cuisine culture.

It's entirely their loss. Coriander/cilantro is very good for sound mental health. Refer to PMC10385770.

If you complain of a soapy taste, you're either using it wrong, or it's your genes, possibly both.

> PMC10385770

TIL, thanks for this!

> Coriander/cilantro is very good for sound mental health. Refer to PMC10385770.

This is a really bad summary of the paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10385770/

To give the TL;DR of the paper:

Psychiatric diseases bad. Coriandrum sativum has some chemicals in it that in some case interact with some things related to some psychiatric diseases.

There are "scarce" (zero?) studies of this, so this "represents an area of opportunity to test the efficacy of the plant as an anxiolytic, antidepressant, antiepileptic, or sleep enhancer."

So: no evidence that it works, just some possible future work.

Maybe it works, maybe it makes things worse. No one knows and PMC10385770 doesn't show either way.

> no evidence that it works.

This is a really bad summary of the paper.

To give the TL;DR of the paper:

Sections 8 and 9 of the paper document how it works. Moreover, references 5 through 13 offer proof that it has been demonstrated to work in diverse species from zebrafish to mice to chicks to humans, basically across the board.

In Australia I learned not to eat two things: vegemite and cilantro.

didn’t read tfa but my daughter has always hated cilantro saying it tasted like stink bugs. about 12 here’s ago she was diagnosed with celiac disease. It was kind of crippling as a family to figure out how we could holiday together outside of packaging and carrying along foods. We discovered Italy is extremely celiac friendly as it is a nationally recognized disease.

I wonder if there’s any correlation between celiac and or related auto immune diseases and celiac palate.

Diagnosed celiac here, though a fairly mild case - blood test detected it 16 years ago, age 48, but I don't know if I've been hit with gluten, though celiac explains why I'm several inches shorter than my brothers and have bone density issues.

Anyway, I love fresh cilantro leaves in food, though it was an acquired taste. So probably no relationship to celiac.

One interesting off-topic datapoint about my diagnosis. I love asparagus, and remember I used to smell "asparagus urine" when I was young, but hadn't for decades. After going gluten-free that typical smell in my urine returned, leading me to believe my celiac diagnosis was accurate and my gut was repairing itself.

I have that silly gene that makes Cilantro taste like soap so the less cilantro is in food the better for me.

And yeah, tastes distinctly and strongly like soap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OR6A2

s/Italy/Greece. Virtually absent from mainstream cuisine

Leaves maybe, the seeds are certainly used? And the leaves at least in dolmades comes to mind (not the vine leaf wrap obviously, but in the rice inside)?

I just came here to say "Coriander"

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