Coriander vs Cilantro

@capirani (2739)
United States
February 9, 2024 11:50pm CST
As a person who has had my own gardens and houseplants since I was a child gardening with my grandpa and my mom, raising houseplants with my mom, etc, I have never heard of any plant having the seed called one thing and the actual plant called something else. Have you? Actually, I never heard of either coriander or cilantro until after I married a man from India and started learning how to cook Indian foods. In India, it only has one name, coriander, whether seed or plant. I can remember going to a regular American local grocery store looking for coriander leaves, like parsley. When we found it, we found out it was called cilantro and had no idea that it had this other name. In America, when you ask for coriander, you only get the seed, either whole or ground. If you want coriander leaf, you have to ask for cilantro. Even when chefs are making Mexican food, they call it cilantro. So, how did this plant get two different names? Are there other plants whose seeds are called one thing while the plant is called something else? Why did this happen to coriander? Why is parsley the same whether seed or plant?
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3 responses
@LadyDuck (458730)
• Switzerland
10 Feb
In the United Sates you use the Spanish name of the spice, I suppose because it's mainly used for Mexican dishes. We call it "coriandolo" in Italian and coriandre in French, both are very similar to coriander. In Spain it is called coriandro, but cilantro in South America.
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@capirani (2739)
• United States
10 Feb
Do you have any idea why they use a different name for the plant than they do for the seed? That is what is so crazy to me. It is the only plant I know of that has a different name for the seed than the plant. For example, if you plant radish seeds you will harvest radishes. If you plant onion bulbs, you harvest onions. If you plant squash or cucumber or any other seed, the product you harvest is of the same name as the seed. Why is coriander different?
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@LadyDuck (458730)
• Switzerland
10 Feb
@capirani I have no idea, because we call the plant and the seed the same.
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@capirani (2739)
• United States
10 Feb
@LadyDuck I have never heard anyone except for Indians calling the seed and the leaf coriander or some such translation of coriander. Everywhere, the leaf is called cilantro. It just makes no sense to me as to why there is a difference in this particular product and no other plant product.
@porwest (78759)
• United States
10 Feb
At the same time, to me, coriander and cilantro taste nothing alike.
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@capirani (2739)
• United States
10 Feb
Are you talking about the seed not tasting like the leaf? I can understand that. I don't think it should taste the same. If you are talking about anywhere you can buy the leaves and they are correctly called coriander, they should taste the same as the cilantro because they are the same plant. The only places I know of in America, at least in the areas I have lived and shopped, where you can buy the leaf and it is correctly called coriander, is oriental and Indian groceries.
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@capirani (2739)
• United States
12 Feb
@porwest I think I said in my original post that is the hoity toity chefs that have done this. But that is just my very poor guess. Just like my post about polenta and corn mush. Maybe those of us who consider the seed and the leaf of any plant the same thing are just not fancy enough. LOL It is kind of like how French cooking is somehow where things started decades ago to be all the rave. Everything seems to come from Western Europe.
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@porwest (78759)
• United States
11 Feb
@capirani Here in the United States (where we both live of course) coriander is the seed and cilantro is the leafy plant. So far as I know the seed has never been labeled as cilantro and the plant has never been labeled as coriander. I could be wrong. But I have always known the seed to be called one thing and the plant another. Maybe they are called different things depending on the nature of the store selling either. I just don't know.
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@arunima25 (85441)
• Bangalore, India
10 Feb
I came to know of this when we stayed in the US. I am from India and we call coriander for both seeds and leaves. We would just add leaves and seeds at the end of coriander to distinguish them.
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