The Seed of the Manna, and of Love

Coriander, Coriandrum sativum, the leaf known in many countries as cilantro, is an aromatic annual of the carrot family, one of the oldest of cultivated herbs, its seeds found in ancient Egyptian tombs. It earns a place in scripture as a measure of colour and size: the manna that fed Israel in the wilderness is twice compared to coriander seed, white and small. The plant's name is often derived from the Greek koris, a bug, for the sharp smell of the unripe seed and fresh leaf, which some relish and others find offensive, a division now known to have a partly genetic basis in the sense of smell.

Coriander seeds were among the offerings placed in the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, found still preserved when the tomb was opened in 1922, physical evidence for a plant already ancient by the time of the New Kingdom and one whose seed keeps remarkably well over millennia. The plant travelled far beyond Egypt and the Near East in antiquity: it is named in the Sanskrit medical literature of ancient India and was later carried by Spanish colonists to the Americas, where cilantro, from the Spanish word for the same plant, became and remains one of the defining flavours of Mexican and wider Latin American cooking.