Recipes with coriander

Coriander is the one plant that yields two ingredients with almost nothing in common. The leaf is fresh, green and peppery, and vanishes with cooking; the seed is warm, dry and faintly orange-scented, and gives nothing up until heat has been applied. Confusing them, or swapping one for the other, never produces the dish you were after.

Cuisines that use the leaf treat it more like a salad than a herb: it arrives at the very end, raw, in quantity. Mexican guacamole and ensalada chilena take not a pinch but a handful chopped at the last second. Brazilian vegetable moqueca and quibebe add it off the heat, once the coconut milk has stopped trembling. Portuguese açorda alentejana does the opposite and makes it the base of the soup itself, pounded in a mortar with garlic. Okra in tomato sauce and tempeh goreng show the third way, where the herb goes through the pan.

Keep the stalks: they carry more flavour than the leaves and stand up to heat, so they belong in the pot while the leaves wait for the plate. To store the bunch, trim the base, stand it in a glass of water in the fridge and invert a bag over the top.