> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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]
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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!"
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)'
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 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.
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.
>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.
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 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!
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:
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 :)
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
… 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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