The
Sunny Spice
Why
coriander seeds are one of the best exchanges we ever made with the West
Have you ever burned a dish while cooking just
hours before guests arrive? And have then opened the windows and turned the fan
on full blast to get rid of the smoke while you simultaneously order in food
that you can pass off as your own? But whatever you do, a faint burned whiff
always seems to linger, which is when you need to perform a neat trick using
one of the most humble ingredients in the kitchen - whole coriander seeds.
Just shake a small heap of these yellowgreen seeds into a pan and roast over high heat. Very soon a wonderful aroma pervades the kitchen. The dominant note is burned orange, a citrusy aroma whose sweetness is about to caramelise, but without losing out that fresh, almost flowery appeal. It is sweet, but also savoury, pervasive (it scrubs off that burned smell) but not dominating the way other spices can be. The immediate reaction from your guests will be what an appetising kitchen you have, but they probably won't be able to pinpoint it down to one dish or ingredient, least of all humble sabut dhania.
Coriander seeds are hugely undervalued. Both by volume used - other spices are used in pinches, coriander seeds in tablespoons - and variety of uses they are the most hardworking of spices, yet they never get the attention given to spices like cinnamon or clove. Cumin whose earthiness is so wellmatched by coriander's more sunny nature in the dhania-jeera mix is more high profile. Even coriander leaves, the subject of last week's column, are more attention grabbing than their sibling seeds.
Some people are barely aware they are related (though if you taste both and concentrate you get a similar citrus note), which is why they have two names: dhania for the seeds and kothmir/kothamelli for the leaves, a distinction that K.T.Achaya notes goes back to the Sanskrit dhanyaka and kusthumbira. The 'cilantro' term, which Americans have applied to the leaves updates this distinction, with the seeds remaining coriander, an unflattering term that derives from the Greek word for bed-bugs, which is what some people seem to have felt they smell like.
Yet coriander has a history far longer and more important than such rude names suggest. It originated in the lands around the Mediterranean and for centuries was much used, not just because it was so aromatic and versatile, but also because it grew easily and was abundantly available. Jack Turner in his book Spices: the History of a Temptation notes that Tutankhamen's mummy was found to be treated with coriander and resins to preserve it. The Greeks and Romans used coriander a lot in their food - a Mycenaean palace built around 1300 BCE, the era of the Trojan war, has yielded tablets with storekeeping accounts that include entries, written in primitive Greek, for ko-ri-a-da-na.
But despite this pedigree, coriander is used far more in India than it is in the West today. Turner's explanation for this is that it lost out when exotic and powerfully flavoured spices started arriving from the East. Human nature being what it is, we have always been easily seduced by fashion and luxury and that is what the Eastern spices represented, while coriander was too homely and cheap. "So thoroughly implanted is the sense of otherness of spices that native Mediterranean aromatics such as cumin, coriander, saffron and fennel have come to be associated more with the cuisine of the countries that adopted them than with the lands of their origin," writes Turner.
In other words, we gave them pepper, cinnamon and cardamom and got jeera, dhania, kesar and saunf in return, which must be one of the few good exchanges we ever made with the West. Because while all our strong spices are wonderful in their own way, in terms of sheer utility it is hard to match coriander. It is used in meat dishes, giving a sweet-savoury base to curries and also acting as thickening agent (Harold McGee notes that the seed hull is strongly hygroscopic), while also providing a warm, but not distractingly pungent note in all kinds of preserved meats like sausages and biltong, the delicious South African dried meat, where it acts as a preservative as well.
It is equally important in vegetable dishes, either as an essential part of most masalas, but also, as we don't do enough in India, used by itself. These are called 'a la Grecque' or Greek-style dishes in classical French cuisine where the ground coriander provides a mellow background that displays the tastes of the vegetables all the better. Coriander was used to flavour the earliest forms of beer, invented in the Sumerian civilisation of the third millennium BCE, and this has been revived by modern wheat beers like Hoegaarden, now available in India. It is one of the basic 'botanicals' used to flavour gin and if you want to make an excellent citrus-fragrant drink, simply soak lemon peels and roasted coriander seeds in brandy and leave for a couple of weeks; the peels give the immediate kick, but the seeds add a flowery note that lingers beautifully on your palate.
Coriander even makes for an intriguing flavouring for cakes and sweets. In any plain cake recipe just substitute a couple of tablespoons of freshly ground coriander for the usual vanilla essence and you get a cake with a fragrant, evanescent flavour; people you give it to taste will be fascinated, because they almost feel they know what it is, but can't get it, and will almost never guess that it is dhania. And as a bonus, while you bake it, your kitchen fills up with the fabulous smell of the spice that needs to be known for itself far more than it is.
Vikram Doctor CDET120907
Just shake a small heap of these yellowgreen seeds into a pan and roast over high heat. Very soon a wonderful aroma pervades the kitchen. The dominant note is burned orange, a citrusy aroma whose sweetness is about to caramelise, but without losing out that fresh, almost flowery appeal. It is sweet, but also savoury, pervasive (it scrubs off that burned smell) but not dominating the way other spices can be. The immediate reaction from your guests will be what an appetising kitchen you have, but they probably won't be able to pinpoint it down to one dish or ingredient, least of all humble sabut dhania.
Coriander seeds are hugely undervalued. Both by volume used - other spices are used in pinches, coriander seeds in tablespoons - and variety of uses they are the most hardworking of spices, yet they never get the attention given to spices like cinnamon or clove. Cumin whose earthiness is so wellmatched by coriander's more sunny nature in the dhania-jeera mix is more high profile. Even coriander leaves, the subject of last week's column, are more attention grabbing than their sibling seeds.
Some people are barely aware they are related (though if you taste both and concentrate you get a similar citrus note), which is why they have two names: dhania for the seeds and kothmir/kothamelli for the leaves, a distinction that K.T.Achaya notes goes back to the Sanskrit dhanyaka and kusthumbira. The 'cilantro' term, which Americans have applied to the leaves updates this distinction, with the seeds remaining coriander, an unflattering term that derives from the Greek word for bed-bugs, which is what some people seem to have felt they smell like.
Yet coriander has a history far longer and more important than such rude names suggest. It originated in the lands around the Mediterranean and for centuries was much used, not just because it was so aromatic and versatile, but also because it grew easily and was abundantly available. Jack Turner in his book Spices: the History of a Temptation notes that Tutankhamen's mummy was found to be treated with coriander and resins to preserve it. The Greeks and Romans used coriander a lot in their food - a Mycenaean palace built around 1300 BCE, the era of the Trojan war, has yielded tablets with storekeeping accounts that include entries, written in primitive Greek, for ko-ri-a-da-na.
But despite this pedigree, coriander is used far more in India than it is in the West today. Turner's explanation for this is that it lost out when exotic and powerfully flavoured spices started arriving from the East. Human nature being what it is, we have always been easily seduced by fashion and luxury and that is what the Eastern spices represented, while coriander was too homely and cheap. "So thoroughly implanted is the sense of otherness of spices that native Mediterranean aromatics such as cumin, coriander, saffron and fennel have come to be associated more with the cuisine of the countries that adopted them than with the lands of their origin," writes Turner.
In other words, we gave them pepper, cinnamon and cardamom and got jeera, dhania, kesar and saunf in return, which must be one of the few good exchanges we ever made with the West. Because while all our strong spices are wonderful in their own way, in terms of sheer utility it is hard to match coriander. It is used in meat dishes, giving a sweet-savoury base to curries and also acting as thickening agent (Harold McGee notes that the seed hull is strongly hygroscopic), while also providing a warm, but not distractingly pungent note in all kinds of preserved meats like sausages and biltong, the delicious South African dried meat, where it acts as a preservative as well.
It is equally important in vegetable dishes, either as an essential part of most masalas, but also, as we don't do enough in India, used by itself. These are called 'a la Grecque' or Greek-style dishes in classical French cuisine where the ground coriander provides a mellow background that displays the tastes of the vegetables all the better. Coriander was used to flavour the earliest forms of beer, invented in the Sumerian civilisation of the third millennium BCE, and this has been revived by modern wheat beers like Hoegaarden, now available in India. It is one of the basic 'botanicals' used to flavour gin and if you want to make an excellent citrus-fragrant drink, simply soak lemon peels and roasted coriander seeds in brandy and leave for a couple of weeks; the peels give the immediate kick, but the seeds add a flowery note that lingers beautifully on your palate.
Coriander even makes for an intriguing flavouring for cakes and sweets. In any plain cake recipe just substitute a couple of tablespoons of freshly ground coriander for the usual vanilla essence and you get a cake with a fragrant, evanescent flavour; people you give it to taste will be fascinated, because they almost feel they know what it is, but can't get it, and will almost never guess that it is dhania. And as a bonus, while you bake it, your kitchen fills up with the fabulous smell of the spice that needs to be known for itself far more than it is.
Vikram Doctor CDET120907
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