Susan Hill dislikes cilantro, and not just a little.
"I just hate it," says Hill, 36, an Annapolis stay-at-home mom. "Oh, I do."
The fresh herb Hill detests is also known as coriander and Chinese parsley. It looks a lot like Italian flat-leaf parsley. And good thing. Cilantro has so many enemies that it could use a couple of aliases and a way to pass for something else in the herb garden.
Once an exotic flavor confined to Mexican, Asian and Indian cooking, cilantro turns up today even in white-bread American restaurants. It has become so commonplace that it's no longer just a flavor but a color; cilantro is a paint hue at Lowe's, according to Cindy Langone of Catonsville, who had her bedroom done in it.
Lots of people love the herb. Just as many, it seems, hate it. There appears to be no middle
ground, and the reason for that just might come down to genetics. Scientists have yet to isolate the cilantro-hating gene, but a Philadelphia researcher who put twins up to sniffing the herb is hot on the trail.
"The twin study we've done implicates genetics to be involved," said Charles J. Wysocki, a behavioral neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center who, for what it's worth, is not a cilantro-hater.
"I love cilantro, but I also like the smell of skunk," he said.
If human DNA really does account for why some people think the herb has a fresh, citrusy flavor and others think it tastes like soap, that could also explain the existence of IHateCilantro.com and its ability to attract 2,809 members, some of whom post haiku on the site. A sample:
Palmolive or Joy
Pour it all over your food
Thus is cilantro
Passions run so high that Hampden's Golden West Cafe will happily hold the cilantro meant for many house specialties. This, in a place with such a strict no-substitutions policy that it won't hold the chile sauce or even serve it on the side because it's "essential to the dishes that include it."
"It's definitely become a concern," said waiter Clark Ross. "If people say, 'No cilantro,' we take it very seriously. We treat it as if it were an allergy."
Customers who make this request might have a genetically based inability to smell certain odors, which the body interprets as flavor when food's involved. The condition is called specific anosmia, and Wysocki's twin study suggests it's the key to cilantro-bashing.
