LONDON — There are a few ingredients that I now keep safely up my sleeve and add to my food only as an absolute last resort. I do this because I know that if I were left to my own devices, I would probably use them in every single meal.
I guess there isn’t anything terribly wrong with this per se, but as someone who writes recipes for a living, I am worried about running out of credit with certain ingredients. I know for a fact that I have hit my lemon quota a vast number of times and that I am pretty close to reaching my limit with feta, yogurt and tahini. It is simply too easy to transform a dish with a hurried drizzle, or a sprinkle, or a scatter of one particular kind, that I worry about becoming a culinary con.
Cilantro — both the leaves (known as coriander in many places) and coriander seeds — is similarly concerning. Nearly all of the cuisines in which I feel at home and which give me infinite amounts of playful pleasure are big on cilantro.
My favorite version of cooked Moroccan carrot salad, with lots of cumin, paprika and garlic, gets its spark from freshly chopped cilantro, which highlights the sweetness of the carrot and the acidity of the lemon. Similarly, Mexican salsas and salads get their particular accent from cilantro and, just as in Morocco, they often rest on the interplay of cumin and a sharp citrus (lime, in the Mexican case). Indian cilantro-mint chutney is a condiment I’d be happy to bathe in. These make it almost impossible for me not to finish a dish with a flourish of chopped cilantro or a handful of crushed coriander seeds.
This final gesture is something I routinely do because it really does lift many kinds of dishes to new peaks, whether it’s a simple chopped salad, scrambled eggs, a bowl of steamy rice, a stew or a piece of grilled fish. But my need to show restraint and not exceed my cilantro quota means that I now reserve its use to meals in which the cilantro effect is seriously amplified, so that this brilliant herb shows itself in all its glory, right at the core of a dish.
There are two ways in which you can push cilantro into the spotlight like that. One method, which many cooks revert to instinctively without even knowing they’re doing so, is pairing it with other members in a large family of ingredients called Umbelliferae. This biological grouping may sound obscure, but carrot, parsnip, celery, parsley, dill and cumin all fall under this umbrella and so, unsurprisingly, go well together. My beloved Moroccan carrot salad is so delicious exactly because of the different umbellifers echoing and complementing one another like lines of good poetry.
The other route to take, if you’re looking to maximize the cilantro effect, is to use the seeds, the leaves, the stem and, if you can get them, the roots. When added at different stages of the cooking and to different parts of a dish, they can create layers of flavor that underpin the dish and give it lots and lots of character. So many Indian curries are based on this clever layering of warming coriander and cumin seeds (plus a whole bunch of other spices) with the intensity and freshness of the fresh leaves.
This kind of focus on different registers of the cilantro flavor is also what I had in mind for these sweet and spicy ribs. Similar recipes often run the risk of being sweet and sticky. Not a bad thing at all with fatty ribs, but the addition of coriander seeds and cilantro appearing in a number of ways offers a welcome contrast to a familiar unctuous sweetness. It is a very appropriate opportunity, I find, to bring out an ingredient I am trying to use in a measured and considerate way.
Recipe: Sweet and Spicy Ribs With Cilantro and Cucumber
And to Drink …
Sweet-and-spicy dishes like these ribs go well with old reliable, sweet-and-acidic German rieslings, especially those bottles labeled kabinett or spätlese. But plenty of other options will do as well. End-of-summer rosés, particularly those with just a touch of fruitiness, will flatter this dish. I don’t often find many dishes that call for a viognier, but this might be the one. If you prefer reds, look for something with some body and fruit, like a Gigondas from the southern Rhône Valley or other wines made from the grenache grape, whether they come from eastern Spain, the West Coast of the United States or Australia. Good California pinot noirs would be fine matches. Dry sparkling wines might be counterintuitive, but you may be surprised at how versatile they can be. ERIC ASIMOV
