Andrew Coletti writes for Gastro Obscura about Why Italy Fell Out of Love With Cilantro; the culinary history is interesting (in a nutshell, “when a distinct Italian culinary identity emerged with the unification of the modern nation in the 19th century, long-abandoned coriander was not revived, but left behind”), but what brings it to LH are these passages:
Native to Europe, Asia, and North Africa, coriander has a long and widespread history of human cultivation. Latin coriandrum, the source of many modern names for the plant, was borrowed from the Ancient Greek koriandron or koriadnon. The Romans developed a taste for the ingredient through the extensive Greek influence on their cuisine.
[…]Coriander leaf was already mostly absent from Italian cuisine by the Renaissance, but the seeds continued to be used as a spice. They were also coated in sugar to make confetti, or “comfits” in English. These were chewed at banquets as an after-dinner mouth freshener and digestive, similar to mukhwas, the mixture of sweetened whole spices chewed in South Asia today for the same purpose. At festive celebrations, coriander comfits were thrown and scattered, giving rise to the English word “confetti” for the paper particles that later replaced them. In modern Italy, paper confetti is still called coriandoli, meaning “coriander seeds,” while confetti usually refers to a different kind of comfit, the sugared almonds given out at weddings and communions.
I had no idea about the origin of confetti! (That last link goes to Italian False Friends by Ronnie Ferguson, which looks like a useful book; we discussed coriander/cilantro back in 2004.)
To me, and probably many others, the first (and perhaps only) encounter with “comfits” came with Alice’s caucus race. Also my first “caucus”.
The only encounter with “comfits”, in my case. If I had seen it more than once, I would have looked up what it means. It was nice to have that little mystery in my vocab, but that has now been destroyed.
Have you never eaten licorice comfits? A staple of my childhood!
We apostates across the ocean know nothing of comfits, I’m afraid.
Very interesting. I wrote an article about coriander/cilantro in my weekly column a few years back: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/coriander-a-great-spice/ but didn’t know this connection to confetti.
Have you never eaten licorice comfits?
I’d have said that here in the U.S., licorice only comes in chewy strands, but an image search for “licorice comfits” gave me an instant olfactory memory. No verbal memory of “comfits” or “torpedoes” or anything else, though. Maybe we called them licorice candies.
Edit: Maybe I should have written U.A.S., for United Apo-States.
Edit 2: Maybe we called them Good & Plenty.
Yes, Good & Plenties appear to be a type of liquorice comfit, but we only know them by the brand name in the Colonies as was. We also only get two colors – pink and white.
Getting from coriandrum to cilantro isn’t so obvious. Says Corominas, under culantro (bold added):
Pace that wise guy, historical linguists don’t all ignore vowels. Also, how I do love Corominas.
It’s tougher to ignore the vowel when the changing vowel leads to a consonant shift.
According to Wikipedia, culantro is different from cilantro, at least in Panama.
Coriander, grown in my garden for cilantro leaves, might be considered an invasive pest by those who don’t love its fragrance and taste. It competes with bienial catnip for real estate.
“ In the U.S. and Mexico, the term “cilantro” typically refers only to the leaves of this popular herb. “Coriander” refers to the seed or spice. However, both come from the same plant. Depending on its usage and the region of the world, cilantro goes by many other names, including:
Coriandrum sativum in Latin
Chinese parsley (leaves)
Coriander (whole plant) in Australia and the UK
Coriander (seeds)
Mexican parsley or cilantro in Spanish (leaves)
Dhanya or dhania in India (leaves)
Koriander in German
Pak chee in Thai
Kuzbara in Arabic”
source: https://www.epicgardening.com/cilantro/
More names here.
“Wanzenkümmel”? Bedbug caraway?
(My mom, when she was little, was not allowed to use the word Wanze. Nice girls from proper families were not supposed to know of the existence of bedbugs.)
Wanze:
Huh! And it can also mean ‘bug, wire, wiretap.’
That’s genius. Why don’t we use vegglus for wiretap in Norwegian?
“Wanzenkümmel”? Bedbug caraway?
Etymonline says, “…from Greek koriannon, often said by botanists to be related to koris “bedbug” from the bad smell of the unripe fruit, or perhaps it is a non-Indo-European word conformed to the Greek insect name.”
However, some modern sites think it’s the leaves that smell like bedbugs.
https://medium.com/be-open/bedbugs-soap-and-coriander-8c287c9d9a81
Others say the leaves smell like stink bugs.
Aha!
(Hat, can you correct the χ to a κ in the Corominas quote?)
think it’s the leaves that smell like bedbugs
Like @Y’s mother (alleged), I don’t think I know what bed bugs smell like.
I do know that if I forget cilantro leaves/stems in the back of the fridge, or standing in water after cutting for a few days, they produce a particularly noxious/bitter smell. Much more so than other herbs/leaves. Is that bed bugs?
Hat, can you correct the χ to a κ in the Corominas quote?
Done!
In USSR this smell was attributed to brandy. It is difficult to tell why in absence of Soviet brandy.
When googling for it, I found
(1) in comments to the article about brandy a discussion between two men over the question whether coriander smells like bed/shield/stink bugs (both are called with the same name in Russian). Someone else noted that “overripe” coriander leaves and “unripe” seeds smell so, while young leaves and dry ripe seeds are ok.
(2) on a site of perfume lovers a discussion where a lady wanted to know opinion of others on the matter the smell of stink bugs. It seems many don’t find it objectionable (and according to the local custom each illustrates her comment with a perfume that makes her think of stink bugs).
Some even say that they smell like coriander.
In USSR this smell was attributed to brandy. It is difficult to tell why in absence of Soviet brandy.
You never had Soviet cognac? (Armenian was the most famous, but AFAIK every wine-growing region produced and still produces something called cognac, even Kazakhstan.)
Relatedly, there is the common complaint that cilantro tastes like soap.
Hans, I did but I don’t remember any wrong smell. And I won’t waste time on trying to find a bottle of cheap Soviet-made cognac to check if it smells worse than or same as modern cognacs from same regions;)
As far as I remember hearing the comparison, the point was not that the cognac smelled wrong, just that the smell of cognac and bedbugs was exactly the same, so if you smelled it, you had the choice between assuming that there were bedbugs around or that someone was drinking.
I don’t know what that is.
No, not “wire” and not even “wiretap”. It’s “bug” in the strict sense, i.e. “hemipteran” – and like in English that’s extended to small hidden microphones; a bugged room is verwanzt.
I’ve encountered bedbugs (Bettwanzen) once ( = once too many; in Paris, BTW) and didn’t notice any smell. Admittedly I’ve never noticed a stinkbug (Stinkwanze) stink either, even though I’ve seen lots and thrown many out of apartments; I think they stink only when they feel threatened.
The most common Wanzen, however, are Feuerwanzen – red bugs.
…huh. I guess that must be extracted from the nicknames Fritz < Friedrich and Lutz < Ludwig after the High German Consonant Shift had made the lengthening of consonants in *n-stem nicknames unrecognizable.
Or that bedbugs were hitting the bottle again.
Some even say that they [bedbugs] smell like coriander.
Leaves or seeds? Or could you tell which they meant?
(As etymonline notes, the “seeds” are technically fruits.)
FWIW, aquavit is traditionally seasoned with caraway*.
I want conundrum to belong here.
* or dill, Wikipedia informs me.
Now I’m wondering whether the unexplained i in cilantro comes from Old Spanish çisme ‘bed bug’, or even, among the learnèd, from its etymon, Latin cimex.
(In modern Spanish, çisme has become chisme and via Mozarabic, chinche. According to Wiktionary, Corominas thinks it more likely that chisme ‘rumor’ comes from from the “bed bug” word than that it comes from cisma ‘schism, discord’.)
Kümmel in English means caraway liqueur. I presume this tastes sweeter than caraway-infused aquavit. I won a bottle of kümmel in my youth while sharing a house with some drinkers deep and wide, and it took several years and open houses to finish the bottle. WP says ‘In Scotland, it is a popular drink at many of the more traditional golf clubs because of its rumored ability to steady the nerves of golfers there, acquiring the nickname of “putting mixture”.’
(In modern Spanish, çisme has become chisme and via Mozarabic, chinche. According to Wiktionary, Corominas thinks it more likely that chisme ‘rumor’ comes from from the “bed bug” word than that it comes from cisma ‘schism, discord’.)
For what it may be worth, The Diccionario de Autoridades offers this:
Diccionario de Autoridades(1726-1739)
Diccionario de Autoridades – Tomo II (1729)
CHISME. s. m. Murmuracion ò cuento, con que [ii.325] algúno intenta descomponer una persóna con otra, metiendo zizaña, y refiriendo lo que no tiene necessidad de que se sepa. Viene del Griego Schisma, por ser este el efecto del chisme, que siempre causa discordias y malas avenencias. Lat. Susurratio.
Bold added.
Relatedly, there is the common complaint that cilantro tastes like soap.
It’s genetic.
In humans, “Top expressed in testicle”.
#
Depending on ancestry, somewhere between 3% and 21% of the population associate it with unpleasant taste, including a combination of soap and vomit, or say that it is similar to the foul smelling odor emitted by stinkbugs.
#
There us a general
Lost my comment.
*pours out a 40 of kümmel for Stu’s lost comment*
Stu, oh, wow!
I wrote above “a discussion between two men over the question whether coriander smells like bed/shield/stink bugs (both are called with the same name in Russian). ”
One insisted that it is different for different people (parsleу smells so for him and coriander smells so for his wife and others, so he plants coriander and his wife plants parsly and they plant something else between these two sources of obnoxious stink) and thus “people who don’t like caraway” and “people to whom it smells like bugs” must be one group. The other insisted that 99 out of 100 people will confirm that it smells like bugs, whether they like it or not, that differences are “in the head”: the smell is universal, but one can learn to like it.
The discussion was not exactly heated but loud (as much as text comments can be) and energetic.
(my text reads as if they were arguing over whether it is bed bugs or stink bugs. No, I just mean i have no way to tell which of the two is meant here.)
I also recently read the article, and we discussed spice names recently — names for cumin and caraway starts here: https://languagehat.com/curry/#comment-4542451
@Jerry, leaves, I think, because it was “fresh koriandr/kinza” (kinza – borrowed from Georgian – is one more word for it used in Russian, usually in the context of whole plants, leaves and cooking. Coriander is popular in the Caucasus and Georgia in particular. koriandr is what we read on packs with seeds bought in a shop and also in the context of baking.).
And not bedbugs, stink bugs /shield bugs.
They say, the smell evokes sweet childhood memories of picking raspberries in the garden (together with stink bugs who too are eating raspberries):)
I remember hearing this NPR report many years ago, which offered the explanation that people who dislike cilantro are simply unable to experience the wonderful fresh, green, zingy smell of cilantro:
I don’t know whether this has held up over the years—that a specific form of anosmia contributes to the aversion of people who dislike cilantro.
Thanks, @drasvi.
Now I want to know, without doing the experiment, whether stink bugs smell like bed bugs. At least to some people.
I can’t decide whether to act amazed or be ashamed at my initial reaction to cilantro in Mexican cooking. Or maybe it was Cal Mex, a very different creature. My taste buds detected something metallic!. It reminded me of touching my tongue to the posts on a 9 volt battery, as all good little boys did back in the day.
Over many years, the metallic sensation’s faded, and I have grown very fond of cilantro. Lucky for me. My wife honors her country, the U.K., by cooking their national dish—curry. I am dispatched to the grocers to fetch a bunch of fresh cilantro.
No bug smells need apply. Am I a statistical outlier? Metal, anyone?
@cuchuflete: Thanks for the etymology of chisme that Corominas was apparently disagreeing with.
I too think cilantro tastes metallic, and I thought that’s what people didn’t like about it till I found out about the soap thing and now the bug thing.
@Jerry Friedman: The Autoridades, available at the RAE website,
( https://www.rae.es/recursos ) was published about 300 years ago.
I have great respect for Joan Corominas’s scholarship, so I offered the
alternative as a point of information. I’m not competent to judge.
¡Viva la muchedumbre de metálicos, “tutti e due”!
@cuchuflete: I took it as a point of information, and I’m not competent to judge either.
“tutti e due”
“All two” or “all both”, as we say around here.
I just realized something… Puerto Rican Spanish recao ‘culantro (Eryngium foetidum)’, the basis of so much Puerto Rican cuisine, is a semantic narrowing of Spanish recado ‘equipment; provisions; daily shopping; mixture of seasonings, seasoning paste; any of various prepared dishes of various regions’, from recadar ‘to collect, gather’, a now obsolete variant of recaudar. As such, recao provides a good parallel to the semantic narrowing seen in Persian هویج havīj, Turkish havuç ‘carrot’, which are ultimately from Arabic حوائج ḥawāʾij ‘needs; effects, possessions; stuff’ (a plural of حاجة ḥāja ‘a need; thing needed’), via a meaning ‘provisions (as for the kitchen)’. (For this etymology, see the article entitled Carrot in the Encyclopædia Iranica.)
I learned recao in the 90s from a Puerto Rican boyfriend, who thought that culantro sounded funny (culo ‘ass’ + antro ‘cave’).
Arabic حوائج ḥawāʾij ‘needs; effects, possessions; stuff’
Also a Yemeni spice mixture.
“Griego Schisma!”
Those Catholics call their schism “Greek schism”!
Who could imagine that corruption of credo and political pressure from Frankish barbarians could have lead to SUCH a corruption of minds?
Caraway and dill are fine in aquavit, but if it’s coriander in your booze that you’re after, you’re best off just sticking to gin. https://gin-mag.com/2020/10/25/coriander-seeds-botanical-in-gin-distillation-production/
Xerîb,thanks for the link.
I recently mentioned Moroccan xizzu (a word for carrot whose source is unknown) and realised I know little about the history of its cultivation.
So I tired to read more about it – but it never occured to me that Iranica has an article about carrot!
“Also a Yemeni spice mixture.”
I’m unable to etymologise many of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spice_mix
I don’t even understand how masala arose from maṣāliḥ
On a trip to Italy five years ago, I spent a few days in Sulmona because it was Ovid’s hometown (Sulmo) and has a life-sized statue of him in the town square. It’s on the railroad line due east of Rome, about three-quarters of the way to the Adriatic. A lovely little town of ~24,000 people, same size as Staunton, Virginia, where I live, on a hill in a valley surrounded by very tall mountains. The kind of small town where kids play in the streets unaccompanied after dark. One local delicacy was fatty lamb bits broiled on skewers: very tasty.
To get to the point: I’d never heard of ‘confetti’ meaning “sugared almonds given out at weddings and communions”, but Sulmona is apparently where all or most of them are manufactured. There were shops all over town offering hundreds of varieties. It may be better known for ‘confetti’ than for Ovid. The basic ones were pretty much the same as our Jordan almonds, almonds in a hard sugar shell of white or various pastel colors. I understand the different colors signify wedding (the white ones, I assume), baptism, new baby, and several other events (job promotion?).
But the fancy varieties were amazing: filled with Cuban rum and chocolate and lots of other tasty combinations, and with different (softer) shells. Very hard to decide which ones to buy. You could also buy colorful fake flowers shaped like daisies with every petal a ‘confetto’. I told my friends when I got home if I’d stayed more than a week they would probably have found me dead in the street of diabetic shock.
Ah! I just remembered: I still have the box from the place I bought mine to bring home. Here’s the web-site: http://www.dicarlo.it. ‘Vaut le détour.’
My kids: The enchiladas taste weird. Was the cilantro fresh?
Me: We were out, but my friend drasvi on the internet assured me I could substitute bedbugs.
Having just looked over the website, I see that the fancy ones are not ‘confetti’ but ‘dragées’. I wonder what the etymology for that is, but am too lazy to try to find out, and confident that someone here will already know, and get more joy than I would from telling us.
Ryan, perfume lovers from the site mentioned above warn that it is only the stink of stink bugs that recembles coriander and makes you think of picking raspberries in childhood and adds green notes to various exquisite perfumes – but they should NOT be tasted.* They taste HORRIBLE, say the ladies.
Hopefully this does not apply to bedbugs…
*they actually warn about this. LH can even check:)
“The kind of small town where kids play in the streets unaccompanied after dark.”
I understand well what Michael means, just as a side note: this is one of most shocking elements of the transition Russia-to-USSR.
I used to go to street alone (with other kids) since the age of 3. Then when it became “Russia” that became unthinkable. People just ceased to do that (let children play alone in the street).*
Of course, Moscow is both very large and … hm. Not too pretty, I mean, large appartment blocks and everything. So while I do understand Michael, apparently this property does not directly arise from “being a cute Italian town”. It does have something to do with movement of people from small towns to Moscow, but the abruptness of the change (the shift to “modern urbanism”) with the fall of USSR means there are other reasosn.
*- Similarly, people ceased to play football and ice hockey in winter, because that was done on the school stadium, and schools first stopped to make ice rinks for everyone and then built tall fences around the school territory.
– Similarly, the territory around appartment blocks ceased to be the land where people (who often came from villages) plant fruit trees and became the land where large groups of migrant workers hired by local administation destroy everything (because cheap work force controlled by idiots is scary).
I’m generally anti-Soviet but this alienation of space is of course the highly unpleasant.
And of course this all has to do with one of my favorite topics: modern education. Because such “modern urbanism” means school is the only place where kids can play with kids.*
*which in turn has to do with the favorite topic of some others: creation of “nations”
I’ve dealt with bedbugs three times as a guest and a bunch of times as staff and never noticed any smell. If there were a smell it would be easier to detect infestations. Now that I think about it it is surprising.
Culantro vs cilantro in Panama reminds me of how I saw biñuelos for sale there once and when commenting to Spanish speaking friends from other countries they refused to believe that I wasn’t making it up and that they’re called buñuelos everywhere and never with an “i”.
Bedbugs do have some kind of smell. Professional pest control people have dogs trained to sniff out bedbugs, which can otherwise hide well.
Stink bugs stink when you attack them.
Michael Hendry: Having just looked over the website, I see that the fancy ones are not ‘confetti’ but ‘dragées’. I wonder what the etymology for that is, but am too lazy to try to find out, and confident that someone here will already know, and get more joy than I would from telling us.
I didn’t, but still… I thought it would from a French borrowing of the “draw” word – being “drawn” in sugar coating -and one of those back-loans from French, but it’s not. It’s a back-formation or something from (a Latin borrowing of) Greek τραγήματα “dried fruits”.
Drasjert or dragert exists in Norwegian, but it’s not very common. My wife grew up close to a Co-op hypermarket where they sold some Swedish brands of sweets that were otherwise largely unknown. Her favorite Easter candy was (and is) Cloetta’s Dragé-egg, which she and her family to this day calls drage-egg “dragon eggs”.
Russian:
konfettí – coloured paper with French stress. -í – a part of the indeclinabe word.
konfét-ý – soft sweets in usually chocolate coating. Chocolate truffles are konféty. -ý – Russian nom pl.
drazhé – anything in the style of M&Ms, chocolate or sugar coating. Often with nuts inside. Ascorbic acid is also sold in this form.
It makes sense in any case – we all carry hundreds of fairly recently defunct genes for smell receptors around, not always the same ones. Chimpanzees can smell lots of things we can’t.
It also makes sense of me. I can smell the parsley-like smell, but also notice the metallic/soapy/whatever component (and like it, in that combination at least).
Dragee[-]Keksi. Insert some Homeric drooling here.
Japanese 金平糖 konpeito. I have known this word and its origin (Portuguese), and have actually tried it. I had no idea of its background.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konpeit%C5%8D:
“Konpeitō (金平糖, こんぺいとう), also spelled kompeitō, is a type of Japanese sugar candy. It takes the form of a small sphere with a bumpy surface, and comes in a variety of colors and flavors. While Konpeitō, introduced from Portugal, was a sugar-coated confection with a poppy seed or sesame seed center, the Japanese eventually transformed it into an all-sugar confection with a zarame (ザラメ, coarse sugar) center.”
“The word konpeitō comes from the Portuguese word confeito (“comfit”), which is a type of sugar candy, and also an umbrella term for sweets in general. The characters 金平糖 (lit. “golden flat sugar”) are ateji selected mostly for their phonetic value and can also be written 金米糖 or 金餅糖.”
There is more at the Wikipedia article, including a picture.