Cymbopogon citratus (DC.) Stapf, West Indian lemongrass, the culinary species, known only in cultivation and probably of Malesian origin; its relative C. flexuosus, East Indian lemongrass, is grown for its oil
Origin: Java & the Malay Archipelago
Lemongrass is a plant that no one has found in the wild. Cymbopogon citratus is known only from cultivation; it seldom flowers and almost never sets seed, and it has always been carried from garden to garden by dividing the clump and planting the pieces. Its exact origin is therefore unknown. L. P. A. Oyen, writing the account of the plant for the Plant Resources of South-East Asia project, judged a Malesian origin, somewhere in the Malay Archipelago, the most likely, and Soenarko, whose revision of the genus in 1977 remains the standard, treated it as a cultivated plant introduced wherever it grows. Its nearest relatives, the East Indian lemongrass (C. flexuosus) of the Western Ghats and the citronella grasses (C. nardus and C. winterianus) of Sri Lanka and Java, are grown for their oils, and the whole genus is a family of fragrant grasses spread from Africa to Australia.
The first clear description of it comes from the Moluccas. Georg Eberhard Rumphius, the German-born naturalist who spent most of his life in the service of the Dutch East India Company on Ambon, described and illustrated the plant the islanders called sereh as Schoenanthum amboinicum, noting that it grew in all the Malay provinces, in gardens and on the mountains; his Herbarium Amboinense, finished before his death in 1702, was published at Amsterdam between 1741 and 1750. The botanical names followed from the cultivated plant. Augustin Pyramus de Candolle named it Andropogon citratus, for its lemon scent, and in 1906 Otto Stapf of Kew, sorting out the oil-grasses of India and Ceylon, moved it into Cymbopogon.
What it is prized for is citral, the lemon-scented compound it shares with lemon peel. In Southeast Asia it is the stalk that goes into the kitchen, the pale, tight base of the leaf sheaths, bruised to release its oil into a broth or pounded into a paste; in the Americas and Africa it is chiefly the leaves, steeped as a tea. Oyen suggests that its first use was as a flavouring of food and drink, and that the essential oil came later.
Lemongrass travels as a living clump, never as a seed, and so every place that grows it received it by hand. Within Southeast Asia that happened before any record. By the time outsiders wrote about the region's food, lemongrass was in the pounded pastes and broths of the whole of it: the bumbu of Java and Bali, the kroeung of Cambodia, the curry pastes and soups of Siam, the sausages of Laos, the broths of Vietnam and Burma, and the grilled fish of the Tai-speaking Dai of Xishuangbanna in the far south of Yunnan. The dates the atlas gives those points are placements; the plant is older in every one of them than any document.
It was carried out of Asia by the colonial exchange of plants. The Portuguese took it to Brazil, where it became capim-santo, holy grass, and one of the most drunk herbal teas in the country. A date of 1799 is often given for its arrival in Jamaica, where it is fever grass, although the source of the date is not stated, and Yoruba still calls it koríko òyìnbó, the foreigner's grass. After the First World War, Oyen records, it was planted on a large scale for its oil in Central and South America and later in Madagascar, the neighbouring islands, and Africa, and by the late twentieth century most of the world's lemongrass oil came from Central and South America. The trade distinguishes West Indian lemongrass, C. citratus, from East Indian, C. flexuosus, names that say nothing about where either began.
In India lemongrass meant oil before it meant food. The East Indian lemongrass of the Western Ghats was distilled for export, and so much of the oil left through one port that the trade still calls it Cochin oil; the kitchen plant, C. citratus, grows in gardens across the south and west, and in Maharashtra its leaves are boiled into the monsoon tea called gavati chaha, grass tea.
Lemongrass is one of the foundation flavours of Southeast Asian cooking, and its territory is almost exactly the mainland and the western archipelago: Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, with the south of China at the edge. It is almost never the only aromatic. Its usual companions are galangal, makrut lime leaf, shallot, garlic, turmeric, and chilli, and the art is in the proportions; but in a handful of dishes it leads, and those are the ones the atlas files here: the Khmer kroeung and the amok and samlor korko built on it, tom yum and tom kha, bún bò Huế, Balinese sambal matah and sate lilit, the Visayan lechon, Lao sausage, and the Dai grilled fish.
Beyond Asia it is chiefly a tea. Brazil, the Caribbean, West Africa, Mexico, and the islands of the western Indian Ocean all drink it, usually hot, often with ginger, and nearly always in the belief that it breaks a fever, which is where the Jamaican name comes from. The oil is a separate world: lemongrass oil and its citral go into soaps, perfumes, and flavourings, and the plant is grown commercially in India, Guatemala, China, and much of the tropics.
In the kitchen the stalk is used whole and bruised, to be lifted out, or sliced as finely as possible and pounded, since the outer layers are woody; the green leaves are for tea and, in Cambodia, for the green kroeung whose colour they give. Citronella, sold as a mosquito repellent, is a different grass, and the lemon verbena that Spain calls hierba luisa is a different plant altogether.
Historical Journey of Lemongrass
Java & the Malay Archipelago — c. 1000 CE
Lemongrass has never been found in the wild. Cymbopogon citratus is known only in cultivation; it seldom flowers and almost never sets seed, and it has always been spread by dividing the clump and planting the pieces, so that its birthplace cannot be traced by the usual methods. L. P. A. Oyen, writing the plant's account for the Plant Resources of South-East Asia project, judged a Malesian origin, somewhere in the Malay Archipelago, the most likely, and the atlas places the origin there. No document dates it, and the year of this point is a placement; the plant is certainly older in cultivation than any record of it.
The first clear description comes from the eastern end of the archipelago. Georg Eberhard Rumphius, the German-born naturalist of the Dutch East India Company on Ambon, described the plant the islanders called sereh as Schoenanthum amboinicum and noted that it grew in all the Malay provinces, in gardens and on the mountains; his Herbarium Amboinense, finished before his death in 1702, was published at Amsterdam between 1741 and 1750. The Malay world still calls it serai and sereh, and pounds it into the bumbu and rempah of its kitchen. In Java it is one of the two scents, with turmeric, of the marinade for sate ayam, chicken satay grilled over coconut charcoal.
Bali, the Hindu island east of Java, built its cooking on base genep, the 'complete seasoning' of pounded shallot, garlic, chilli, galangal, turmeric, ginger, kencur, and candlenut, and it uses lemongrass more boldly than almost anywhere else in the archipelago. When the plant arrived is not recorded, and the date of the point is a placement.
Two Balinese dishes put lemongrass in front. Sambal matah, the raw sambal eaten beside grilled fish, is shallot, bird's eye chilli, and lemongrass sliced fine and dressed with lime, shrimp paste, and hot coconut oil, with nothing cooked at all. Sate lilit, 'wrapped satay', is minced fish, coconut, and base genep pressed round a stalk of lemongrass instead of a skewer, so that the stalk perfumes the satay from inside as it grills.
No kitchen depends on lemongrass more than the Khmer. The foundation of Cambodian cooking is kroeung, a family of pounded pastes of lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, garlic, shallot, and makrut lime, and lemongrass, slœ̆k krey, is in all of them: the yellow and red pastes use only the stalks, and the green paste takes its colour from the leaves, about three parts leaf to one of stalk. How early it came to Cambodia is not recorded, and the date of the point, set at the height of Angkor, is a placement.
Amok trey, fish folded through coconut cream and yellow kroeung and steamed in a banana-leaf cup, is counted a national dish; its origins are argued between Cambodia and its neighbours, since Thailand has hor mok and the Malay world otak-otak, and a Khmer royal pedigree is claimed for it but not documented. Samlor korko, the 'stirred soup' of vegetables, fish or pork, prahok, and toasted ground rice, is built on the green kroeung.
Thai calls lemongrass takhrai, and central Thai cooking uses it in two ways: pounded into the curry pastes, and bruised and dropped whole into a broth to be fished out again. The date of the point, the founding of Ayutthaya in 1351, is a placement; the plant's arrival is not recorded.
The broths are the famous ones. Tom yum is steeped with lemongrass, galangal, and makrut lime leaf and finished off the heat with fish sauce, chilli, and lime juice, and tom kha is the same trio simmered in coconut milk. In yam takrai the herb is the salad itself: the tender core of the stalk sliced so thin that it can be eaten raw, tossed with prawns, pork, cashews, and dried shrimp in lime and fish sauce.
The Lao kitchen, upstream of the Khmer on the Mekong, is built on fresh herbs, and lemongrass, hua si khai, is among the first of them. The date of the point, 1353, when Fa Ngum founded the kingdom of Lan Xang at Luang Prabang, is a placement.
Luang Prabang is the home of sai oua, the grilled herb sausage of fatty pork pounded with lemongrass, galangal, makrut lime leaf, shallot, and chilli, which is also made across the border in northern Thailand. Mok pa, fish steamed in a banana-leaf parcel, takes a great deal of dill and lemongrass together.
In the far south of Yunnan, on the upper Mekong, the Dai of Xishuangbanna, the old Tai kingdom of Sipsongpanna, cook more like their Lao and northern Thai neighbours than like the rest of China, and lemongrass, which Chinese calls xiangmao, fragrant thatch-grass, is one of their signatures. The date of the point is a placement.
Their best-known dish is xiangmaocao kaoyu, lemongrass grilled fish: a river fish stuffed with chopped lemongrass, chilli, garlic, and coriander, bound with whole lemongrass stalks, and grilled over charcoal. In the night markets of Jinghong the lemongrass fish, the lemongrass chicken, and pounded chicken feet are sold together as the three essentials of the Dai grill.
The Philippines calls lemongrass tanglad, and the central islands, the Visayas, have made it the flavour of their roast meats. The record does not say when it arrived, and the date of the point is a placement.
Cebu's lechon, the fiesta roast pig, is stuffed with bundles of lemongrass, garlic, spring onion, and bay and served without sauce, whereas the lechon of Manila and Luzon is roasted plain and eaten with a sweet liver sauce; the towns of Carcar and Talisay argue over which roasts it best. Across the strait in Negros, Bacolod's chicken inasal is steeped in calamansi, cane vinegar, lemongrass, and ginger and grilled under a basting of annatto oil.
Burmese calls lemongrass zabalin, and it belongs to the cooking of the Irrawaddy delta and the coast, where the flavours of Burma run closest to those of Thailand and the Mon country. When it arrived is not recorded, and the date of the point is a placement.
Its most important dish is mohinga, the national breakfast: rice noodles in a broth of catfish thickened with toasted rice flour and banana stem, in which bruised lemongrass is one of the defining scents, eaten from a roadside stall before the heat of the day.
India has two lemongrasses. The East Indian lemongrass, Cymbopogon flexuosus, the Malabar or Cochin grass, is native to the Western Ghats and has been grown for its oil, shipped to the perfumers of the world from the port of Cochin under the trade name Cochin oil; it is not a kitchen plant. The lemongrass of the Indian garden is C. citratus, the same plant as the Thai and Malay one, which Oyen describes as cultivated for several centuries in South and South-East Asia. When it arrived is not recorded, and the date of the point is a placement.
India uses it little in cooking and a great deal in tea. In Maharashtra the leaves are boiled with black tea, milk, sugar, and ginger into gavati chaha, 'grass tea', the drink of the monsoon, when the plant grows fastest in the wet hills of the Western Ghats.
Vietnamese calls lemongrass sả, and it is one of the defining flavours of the cooking of the centre and the south. The date of the point, when the Nguyễn lords ruled from Phú Xuân, the later Huế, and were pushing south into the Khmer lands of the Mekong delta, is a placement.
Huế's own noodle soup, bún bò Huế, is built on a broth of beef and pork bones steeped with bruised lemongrass and shrimp paste and reddened with annatto chilli oil, and it is the lemongrass that separates it from the phở of the north. The centre also stir-fries chicken with minced lemongrass and chilli as gà xào sả ớt. In the south bò kho, beef stewed with lemongrass, annatto, and star anise, is eaten with bread, and beef grilled in a lemongrass marinade, bò nướng sả, is one of the smells of the Saigon street.
Lemongrass reached Brazil from Asia in the colonial period, and the date of the point is a placement for it; which Portuguese ship or port brought it is not recorded. It found the climate ideal, above all in the North and Northeast, and it now has more names in Brazil than almost any other herb: capim-limão, capim-cidreira, erva-príncipe, and capim-santo, holy grass.
It is used almost entirely as a tea. Chá de capim-santo, the leaves steeped in water just off the boil, is one of the most drunk herbal infusions in Brazil, taken after meals, at night, and against a cold with fever, and the plant is one of those grown in the farmácias vivas, the community medicinal gardens encouraged by Brazil's public health service.
Jamaica calls lemongrass fever grass. A date of 1799 for its introduction to the island is widely repeated, but its source is not given, and the date of the point is a placement. Like the other plants of the colonial botanical exchange, it is likely to have come from the East Indies by way of the gardens of the empire.
Fever grass tea is one of Jamaica's bush teas, the herbal infusions that sit between breakfast and medicine: the leaves steeped hot, sometimes with ginger or mint, and drunk in the morning for pleasure or at night, wrapped in a blanket, to sweat out a fever.
Yoruba has several names for lemongrass, and one of them tells how it came: koríko òyìnbó, the foreigner's grass. It is also kooko oba and ewé tea, the tea leaf, and Igbo calls it achara ehi and Hausa tsauri. When it reached West Africa is not recorded; Oyen notes that large-scale planting in Africa followed the First World War, and the date of the point is a placement for the colonial period in which the foreigner's grass became a household plant.
It is grown in household gardens across southern Nigeria for its tea: a bundle of leaves boiled with ginger and drunk hot with honey, against fever and a cold and for its own sake.
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