Coriander

Coriander is really two ingredients in Greek and Cypriot cooking, and they are not interchangeable. The fresh leaf barely registers on the mainland, where parsley and dill hold that ground, and turns up mostly in Cypriot dishes. The seed is a different matter: Cyprus, Crete and the Cyclades all use it heavily, and a recipe calling for one form very rarely wants the other.

Afelia is the dish that makes the case, pork braised in red wine with a heavy hand of coriander seed, crushed rather than ground so the fragments stay coarse and slightly resinous in the sauce. Cypriot patates antinaktes work the same way, cracked potatoes fried and then finished off the heat with wine and crushed seed, and Cretan cracked olives, elies tsakistes, are cured with it too.

Buy the seed whole and crush it in a mortar just before cooking. Pre-ground coriander loses its citrus note within weeks and turns dusty and flat, which is the usual reason a home afelia tastes of very little. The fresh leaf is the opposite problem: it goes in off the heat at the end, since cooking it for any length of time strips out exactly the flavour it was bought for.