Coriander is an intercontinental herb, which causes puzzlement by cropping up all over the place under a variety of different names. Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, although best known for her books The Best of Caribbean Cooking and The Complete Book of Mexican Cooking, is one of the relatively few cookery writers with direct knowledge and practical experience of cooking in both hemispheres and in four of the five continents. (She has also visited the fifth!) She is thus ideally equipped to furnish this essay on what is often, but misleadingly, called Chinese parsley.