Eryngium foetidum L., a biennial or short-lived perennial rosette herb native to tropical America and the West Indies; not a relative of coriander, Coriandrum sativum, beyond the shared family
Culantro is a plant that people found rather than made. It grows wild across the American tropics, from southern Mexico through Central America and the islands of the Caribbean to the basin of the Amazon, a flat rosette of long, narrow, saw-edged leaves that comes up in cleared and disturbed ground and at the shaded edge of forest, and it has been gathered wherever it grows and planted in yards and gardens wherever people wanted it closer. There is no single wild ancestor to trace and no moment of domestication to date; the cultivated plant is the wild plant, grown on purpose. How long it has been eaten the record does not say. A leaf leaves nothing for an archaeologist to recover, and the absence of evidence is only that: the earliest written notice the atlas has found is in Portuguese texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries recording it under cultivation in Brazil, as a review by Rodrigues and colleagues sets out.
It belongs to the carrot and parsley family, like coriander, but to a quite different genus, Eryngium, the sea hollies, and it shows it. Where coriander is a delicate annual with soft divided leaves and a seed that is a spice in its own right, culantro is a tough rosette with a spiny flower head, and its leaf is the only part the kitchen uses. It grows best in shade and moisture; in full sun and long days it bolts to flower and the leaves turn hard, which is why Trinidadian growers raise it under shade. Linnaeus named it in 1753, and the name he chose, foetidum, stinking, is his verdict on the smell.
That smell is the reason it is eaten. Its essential oil is dominated by (E)-2-dodecenal, a long-chain aldehyde known in this plant as eryngial, which belongs to the same family of compounds that give coriander leaf its scent. So the two herbs smell alike, but culantro smells several times more strongly, and, crucially for the cook, it holds that smell through long cooking, where coriander leaf collapses within minutes. That single property explains much of where and how it is used: by the handful rather than the sprig, in soups and stews that simmer for hours, and in hot climates where coriander itself grows poorly.
The atlas once carried culantro inside its Coriander entry, and it has its own entry now because it clears both of the tests the atlas applies. It is a different plant, in a different genus, native to a different hemisphere; and it carries a body of dishes, from Panama's sancocho to Puerto Rico's recaíto and Trinidad's chadon beni sauce, in which coriander would give the wrong result.
Across its native range culantro did not so much travel as get taken up, kitchen by kitchen, by the peoples who met it. The Indigenous cooks of the Amazon put it into their cassava-based dishes; the Spanish of the Antilles and the Isthmus named it after the coriander it resembled and built it into their colonial cooking; and the Africans brought to the Caribbean and the Pacific coast of South America made it central to theirs. The names it gathered on the way record each arrival: culantro and recao from the Spanish, chardon béni from the French Creoles of the Antilles, chillangua from the Afro-Colombian Pacific, bhandhania from the Indians of Trinidad, sacha culantro from the Quechua-speaking Amazon.
Leaving the Americas, it crossed the Pacific rather than the Atlantic, and it did so late and without a documented carrier. The account most often repeated, which appears to derive from the Plant Resources of South-East Asia volume on spices, is that Chinese traders introduced it into South-East Asia around the 1880s as a substitute for coriander, which does badly in the lowland heat. The names it acquired there suggest a different story, or at least a more complicated one. Thai calls it phak chi farang, European coriander; Malay ketumbar Jawa, Javanese coriander; Tripura bilati dhonia, foreign coriander; and Meitei, in Manipur, awa phadigom, Burmese coriander, which is also what the Chinese of Yunnan call it. Every one of these names places the plant's origin somewhere else, and none of them points to China. The record does not settle the question, and the atlas draws the Asian journey from the American tropics without naming a port.
What is clear is where it took hold. Vietnam made it ngò gai, thorny coriander, a fixture of the herb plate and the sour soup; north-eastern Thailand and Laos made it the signature herb of their hot and sour soups and meat salads; the Dai of southern Yunnan use it the same way; and it moved west through Burma into the hills of north-eastern India, where it is now cooked in every state from Tripura to Sikkim. It is also grown commercially in Australia and elsewhere. Africa grows it, and botanists record it there, but the atlas has found no African cuisine in which it is a staple, and the journey does not claim one.
Culantro is two things at once today: an everyday herb of two regions on opposite sides of the world, and an ingredient that the rest of the world is only beginning to notice. In the Caribbean and the Isthmus it is indispensable. Puerto Rico grows it commercially for recaíto, the green base of its cooking; Trinidad uses it in almost every savoury dish and exports the fresh leaf by air to the Caribbean communities of North America; and Panama's national dish is built on it. In mainland South-East Asia and north-eastern India it is a staple of the herb plate and the soup pot, from the phở stalls of Saigon to the kitchens of Imphal.
Elsewhere it is still confused with coriander, and the confusion is built into the language. The Spanish word culantro descends, like coriander itself, from the Latin coriandrum, and older Spanish used it for coriander; Peru still does, and the Philippines calls coriander kulantro, whilst Panama, Puerto Rico, and much of the Caribbean give the word to Eryngium foetidum alone. A Peruvian recipe that calls for culantro means coriander, and a Panamanian one means this plant, which is why the Peruvian Amazon calls the native herb sacha culantro, the wild one, to tell it from the coast's. Western supermarkets have begun to sell it, usually as culantro or sawtooth herb, most often in shops serving Caribbean and South-East Asian communities.
For the cook, the rule is simple. Culantro is the herb to cook with and coriander the herb to finish with. A handful of culantro will survive three hours in a sancocho; a handful of coriander will not survive ten minutes. Where a recipe names one, the other is a substitute and not an equivalent, and the atlas says so wherever it matters.
Historical Journey of Culantro
Belém, Pará & the Lower Amazon — Before 1500 CE
Culantro was never domesticated in the way that maize or cassava were. It is a wild plant of the American tropics, native from southern Mexico through Central America and the Caribbean to the Amazon basin, a low rosette of long saw-edged leaves that springs up in cleared ground, along paths, and in the shade at the edge of forest, and people have simply gathered it, and later planted it, wherever it grew. Its range is so wide that no single place can claim to be its home, and this point stands for the whole of it. How long it has been eaten there the record does not say: a leaf leaves nothing for an archaeologist to find.
The lower Amazon is where the written record first catches it in a kitchen. A review of the plant's uses by Rodrigues and colleagues notes Portuguese texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries recording it under cultivation in Brazil, and Pará still uses it more than any other Brazilian state, as chicória-do-pará or chicória-de-caboclo, sold in the market bundle of cheiro-verde beside the other herbs of the region. It goes into the dishes Pará inherited from its Indigenous peoples and cooks as a matter of identity: tacacá, the scalding bowl of tucupi, the fermented yellow juice pressed from bitter cassava, with dried prawns and the tongue-numbing jambu; and pato no tucupi, duck simmered in that same juice, the dish of Belém's great October festival of the Círio de Nazaré.
San Juan & Puerto Rico — c. 1600 CE
Culantro grows wild through the Greater Antilles, and in Puerto Rico it became the defining herb of the island's cooking. The island calls it recao, and the green seasoning paste built on it is recaíto, the diminutive: ají dulce, the sweet and perfumed cousin of the habanero, blitzed with onion, garlic, and a great deal of recao, and fried in annatto oil at the start of almost every rice dish, bean pot, and stew on the island. It is what separates the Puerto Rican kitchen from the neighbouring Hispanic kitchens, which lean on coriander instead. The date of this point is a placement for the Spanish colonial kitchen in which recaíto took shape; the plant was in the island long before it.
Recao is grown commercially for the purpose. Christopher Ramcharan, writing in 1999, recorded that Puerto Rico produced 165,000 kilograms of the herb in 1988, worth about $201,000, and it is sold in every colmado in bundles tied with a rubber band. Asopao de pollo, the soupy chicken and rice of rainy days and late nights, is the dish that shows it best: recaíto at the start, and a handful of fresh recao chopped over the pot at the end.
Panama City & the Isthmus — c. 1600 CE
Panama and the Isthmus are where the word culantro settled on this plant. The word itself is Spanish, a sister form of cilantro, and both descend from the Latin coriandrum, so that the Spanish arriving in the Americas named the native leaf after the Old World herb it resembled. Panama kept culantro for the American plant, and so, with some exceptions, did the Caribbean coast of Central America; Peru kept it for the coriander of the Old World, which is why the same word names two different herbs a few hundred miles apart. Costa Rica calls the native plant culantro coyote. The date of this point is a placement.
In Panama culantro is the national herb. Sancocho de gallina, the national dish, is a stewing hen simmered for hours with ñame, onion, garlic, and an enormous quantity of culantro, and the herb's great virtue shows in it: coriander would have faded to nothing in three hours on the fire, but culantro holds its smell to the end. The Panamanian ceviche of corvina, sold by the paper cup at the fish market on the waterfront, is chopped through with it too, and is cured for hours in lime rather than minutes, as it is in Peru.
Esmeraldas & the Pacific Lowlands — c. 1650 CE
The Pacific lowlands of Colombia and northern Ecuador, a country of mangrove, river, and rain forest, were settled by people of African descent from the sixteenth century onwards, and in Esmeraldas their history begins with a shipwreck: in 1553 a vessel carrying enslaved Africans ran aground off the coast and the survivors, under a leader the Spanish called Alonso de Illescas, founded free communities in the forest. Along this whole coast culantro is chillangua, a name given by the Afro-Colombian communities of Cauca and Nariño and adopted across the border in Esmeraldas. The date of this point is a placement.
It is the flavour of the coast's cooking, and cooks there say so without qualification. On the Colombian side it is grown in azoteas, raised gardens in old canoes and wooden boxes set on stilts or rooftops out of reach of the floods, and chopped with onion, tomato, sweet pepper, and annatto oil into the base on which everything else is built. In Esmeraldas it goes into encocado, fish or prawns in coconut milk, and into tapao, fish steamed over green plantain in a covered pot. Many families hold that their ancestors brought the herb from Africa; the plant is American and was already growing wild in the forest, and what the ancestors brought was the way of cooking with it.
Port of Spain & Trinidad — c. 1790 CE
Culantro grows wild in the forests of Trinidad, thickest where the ground has been cleared, and the island's names for it record two of the great arrivals in its history. The Cedula of Population of 1783 opened Spanish Trinidad to Catholic settlers, and French Creole planters came in numbers, bringing the French of the Antilles with them: they called the plant chardon béni, blessed thistle, a name that in France belongs to a quite different plant, Cnicus benedictus, and the island wore it down to chadon beni, shado beni, and shadow benny. From 1845 indentured labourers from northern India added bhandhania, from the Hindi ban dhaniya, forest coriander. The date of this point is a placement for the first of those arrivals.
Trinidad now uses culantro more than any other island in the Caribbean. It is the lead herb of green seasoning, the blended marinade that starts nearly every savoury dish; it goes raw into the fruit chows of mango and pineapple; and blended with garlic, pepper, and lime it becomes chadon beni sauce, the thin green sauce of every doubles stand and every bake and shark hut at Maracas Bay. The island grows it under shade, since it bolts in full sun, and exports it: Ramcharan recorded one Trinidadian exporter air-freighting up to 2.4 tonnes a week to the United States.
Iquitos & the Peruvian Amazon — c. 1800 CE
Peru uses the word culantro for coriander, the Old World herb brought by the Spanish and grown on the coast and in the Andes. So when the long-leaved native plant of the Amazon needed a Spanish name, it became sacha culantro, from the Quechua sacha, wild or of the forest: the wild culantro, as opposed to the cultivated one. The same word gives sacha inchi, the wild peanut. The date of this point is a placement for the mission and river towns of Loreto, of which Iquitos, founded in the eighteenth century, became the capital in the rubber boom.
In the selva sacha culantro is the everyday herb. It goes by the handful into inchicapi, whose Quechua name means peanut soup, a hen simmered and thickened with ground peanuts and maize flour, with yuca; and it is packed with onion, sweet pepper, and the tiny round ají charapita around river fish wrapped in bijao leaves and laid on the coals for patarashca. It is the herb that tells someone from Loreto that the food is from home.
Taunggyi, Inle & the Shan Highlands — c. 1880 CE
Burma's neighbours are unanimous about where they got culantro. The Meitei of Manipur call it awa phadigom, Burmese coriander; the Chinese of Yunnan call it mian yuansui, which means the same; and those names, given independently on opposite sides of the country, make Burma the hub from which the plant spread west into the hills of north-eastern India and north-east into the Dai country. How it reached Burma in the first place is not recorded, any more than how it reached Siam or Indochina, and the date of this point is a placement that sets Burma a little ahead of the neighbours that name it after Burma.
It is the hill peoples who use it most. Burmese food writers note that the cooking of the Shan and the Kachin, in the uplands of the east and north, uses fresh herbs, sawtooth coriander amongst them, far more freely than the cooking of the Irrawaddy plains. Sahpye shows it plainly: rice vermicelli under sliced meat and a sharp, oil-free sauce, sour and bitter in Shan State and sour and fiery in Kachin State, eaten under a heap of culantro, Vietnamese coriander, chives, and pennywort. Across the frontier in Xishuangbanna the Dai make the same dish as sapie, with the same herb, which is the plant's route to Yunnan written on a plate.
Hanoi, Saigon & Vietnam — c. 1890 CE
Culantro crossed the Pacific in the nineteenth century, and how is disputed. The account most often repeated is that Chinese traders introduced it into South-East Asia around the 1880s as a substitute for coriander, which grows poorly in the lowland heat; but the names it acquired across the region point elsewhere, for the Thai call it foreign or European coriander, and the carrier and the port are not recorded. The date of this point is a placement, and the journey is drawn from the American tropics rather than from any one place in them.
Vietnam calls it ngò gai, thorny coriander, and took it into the heart of its herb culture. It is on the plate of raw herbs set beside a bowl of phở, most reliably in the south, with Thai basil, mint, bean sprouts, and lime, and it is the herb of the southern sour soups: in canh chua, the tamarind-sour fish soup of the Mekong delta, it is paired with ngò om, rice paddy herb, and Vietnamese cooks treat the two as inseparable in the way that European cooks treat salt and pepper.
Khon Kaen & the Khorat Plateau — c. 1890 CE
Thai calls culantro phak chi farang, and the name is the best evidence there is of how the plant was understood when it arrived: phak chi is coriander and farang is a Westerner, so it is European or foreign coriander, an import from the outside world, though the record does not say who brought it or when. The date of this point is a placement that follows the account of an introduction in the 1880s. Malay speakers called it ketumbar Jawa, Javanese coriander, naming it too after the place they thought it came from.
It found its strongest home in Isan, the north-east, and in the neighbouring Lao and northern Thai kitchens, where it is used as freely as coriander is used in Bangkok. It is the signature herb of tom saep, the lean, fiery, sour soup of pork ribs in which it holds up to the heat where coriander leaf would wilt away, and it is tossed by the handful with mint and shallot into larb and nam tok, the grilled meat salads dressed with lime and toasted rice powder. The Dai of Xishuangbanna, over the border in Yunnan, whose language and cooking are close kin to those of the Thai, use it in the same way, and have a point of their own on this journey.
Xishuangbanna & the Dai Country — c. 1900 CE
The Dai of Xishuangbanna, in the far south of Yunnan, are a Tai people whose language and cooking belong to the same world as those of the Lao, the Shan, and the Thai of the north, and culantro is as central to their kitchen as it is to Isan's. Three things season nearly all Dai food: small green limes, xiaomila millet chillies, and da yuansui, big coriander, which is this plant. How and when it arrived is not recorded, and the date of this point is a placement that follows the mainland South-East Asian points.
The Chinese names are a small history of their own. It is ci yuansui, thorny coriander, and da xiangcai, big coriander, in Yunnan; jia yuansui, false coriander, in Guangxi and Guangdong, where it also grows wild; and mian yuansui, Burmese coriander, the same name the Meitei of Manipur give it on the far side of Burma. That name points to Burma as the way it came, and the journey is drawn from there. The Dai share most of their cooking with Laos and northern Thailand, but the plate says Burma too: the Shan across the frontier eat the same bitter-sauced rice noodles, sahpye, that the Dai call sapie.
Daiwei guiji, Dai-style ghost chicken, torn by hand and dressed with lime, chilli, and garlic under a heap of culantro, is the dish that shows it most plainly; the herb also goes into sapie, the bitter beef and rice-noodle dish, and into fish grilled in leaves.
Imphal & Manipur — c. 1920 CE
In Meitei, the language of the Imphal valley, culantro is awa phadigom: phadigom is coriander and awa is Burma, so the name means Burmese coriander and records that the plant came over the hills from the east. When is not recorded, and the date of this point is a placement. It is now used across the whole of north-eastern India, as bahkhawr in Mizoram and bilati dhonia, foreign coriander, in Tripura, and through Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, and Sikkim.
Manipuri cooks chop it fine and fry it in oil before it goes into a dish, which rounds its sharpness, and they value it above all with meat, because it takes away the heavy smell of cooked flesh. A plain moong dal finished with fried awa phadigom is everyday food in the valley, and the herb is torn raw over eromba, the rough mash of boiled vegetables, ngari fermented fish, and roasted king chilli that is eaten with nearly every Manipuri meal.
