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.
