The One Ingredient Ina Garten Will Never Cook With (Julia Child Hated It Too!)
Ina Garten and Julia Child are culinary queens in their own right. Both women made a way for themselves, creating empires through their delicious recipes, renowned cookbooks, and joyous personalities that captivated audiences nationwide. Over the course of their careers, they enjoyed and cooked dishes from a wide range of cuisines, but there’s one ingredient that they both agree doesn’t belong in food.
In a 2002 interview with Larry King, Julia Child revealed that if she saw cilantro in a dish, she “would pick it out … and throw it on the floor” and thought it had a “dead taste.”
Similarly in an interview with TODAY, Ina Garten confessed that she was in alignment with Child, saying, “I just can’t stand cilantro; that’s easy. It’s such a strong flavor and it overwhelms everything else and I actually think it’s physiological.”
Garten’s right. Whether or not you like cilantro is based on your genetics. Cilantro, also known as coriander, is used globally in dishes around the world — but for some people, it has a soapy taste.
I’m in the same boat as Garten and Child. If I’m served a dish made with cilantro, I will pick around it, move it to the side, or take it out of the dish completely. (I can’t count how many guacamoles or curries have been ruined by the soapy herb.)
But why is this? Certain people have a variation in their olfactory-receptor genes which allows them to strongly pick up on aldehydes in cilantro leaves, a chemical compound often found in soaps and lotions.
Overall only a small percentage of the population has these cilantro-averse genes. (In the United States, it’s roughly 4 to 14 percent.) It’s also no coincidence that the countries with the smallest population of cilantro-averse citizens are Mexico and India — where people use cilantro in their cooking often.
You can try to build up your tolerance with repeated exposure to the herb. Some even say crushing it rather than eating it whole helps dilute the soapy flavor. But, like Garten and Child, I’m happy to just leave it out.
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