Newly known unknowns

[muckefuck]

Thanks to Jill Norman (by way of his_regard) here are ten herbs which I didn't know I didn't know about until two days ago:

1. miner's lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata)
2. salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor)
3. mitsuba (Cryptotaenia japonica)
4. orache (Atriplex hortensis)
5. vietnamese balm, a.k.a. rau kinh giới (Elsholtzia ciliata)
6. houttuynia, a.k.a. rau diếp cá (houttuynia cordata)
7. rice paddy herb, a.k.a. rau ngò ôm (Limnophila aromatica)
8. calamint (Calamintha nepeta)
9. micromeria, a.k.a. yerba buena (Clinopodium douglasii)
10. Vietnamese coriander, a.k.a. rau răm (Polygonum odoratum)

It may be hard to appreciate how exciting this is for me unless you know that I've been interested in herbs since I was eleven or twelve. My father, who eventually went on to teach horticulture, had a sprawling herb garden with two kinds of chives, three kinds of thyme, and seventeen different varieties of mint, and I used to help him with it. So I'm not at all accustomed to running into herbs I've never even heard of before.

It's especially surprising to see so many Vietnamese herbs since I live just outside Little Saigon and Bruce Cost's Asian ingredients is one of my favourite cooking books. It's quite likely that I've eaten every one of these rau at some time or another without knowing what it was. And there's so much I still don't know even about the herbs I fancy myself familiar with, like Eryngium foetidum or rau ngò gai [lit. "flax coriander plant"], which I always call "sawtooth herb", but which Norman's book refers to as "culantro" (which just looks to me like cilantro that grows out of your ass) and tells me is actually native to Mexico and not Asia at all. Who knew?

The Mexicans have a lot to answer for, as it turns out. I've known the name "yerba buena" for years, but in Mexican/Chicano usage it usually designates a Mentha species, generally spearmint or peppermint. I had no idea that it could refer to herbs of a completely different genus. Now I'm wondering if it was among those many exotic species of "mint" we cultivated. I don't remember one called "Oregon tea", but I can't remember all the names and we did have one called "Mormon tea mint".

So many things to try! And me so lazy!

Comments

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

We grew rau răm one year. I thought it was OK, but innerdoggie disliked it. (I thought it was available at the Broadway market, but it'd be among the vegetables.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I'm sure most of these are, it's just that the labeling is so quirky (sometimes Vietnamese, Chinese, and English, other times one of the three--and you can be sure the same English name will be used twice for the same plant) that it's hard to be sure unless you already know what you're looking for. For example, I think I may have thought rau ngò ôm was simply a Vietnamese term for "watercress".

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought the Polygonum tasted kinda like licorice and kinda like a chile pepper in an unpleasant way.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of planting some houttuynia as a ground-cover (it's brightly colored and tacky!), but I couldn't get ahold of any. I'll let you know if I ever do, and you can come over and eat some!

[zompist.livejournal.com]

To my knowledge, cilantro and culantro are just variations of the same word (my wife tells me that both terms are found in Peru, in different areas). But perhaps there's some region where they've taken on different referents?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's also called Mexican coriander, so perhaps Mexico is where the term culantro is common? In any case, it's a slightly more source for borrowing into English than South American Spanish.