Shado beni (Trinidad), chadron benee (Dominica), herbe à fer (Martinique and Guadeloupe), fitweed (Guyana), koulante (Haiti), recao (Puerto Rico), ketumbar java (Malaysia), pak chi farang (Thailand), ngo gai (Vietnam), culantro, racao or recao (Central America), bhandhanya (India), long leaf or spiny or sawtooth coriander (North America)….. no wait, there’s more….

the Lamont Cranston of herbage

So one of my very favorite things about living in this city is that conversations with strangers tend to unfold like this:
stranger: Your accent is weird. Where are you from?
me: London/Scotland via Texas and Louisiana. You?
stranger: Oh! I’m (insert appropriate ethnic/geographic denomination). What are you doing here?
me: Well, I’m a cook….

…and at this point, with great glee, they share with me a special recipe, or a tip on where to buy some unusual ingredient, or the address of the ONLY place in the tri-state area that will make, just like mama used to, the-thing-with-the-name-I-have-to-ask-them-to-spell. You get the idea – it’s a universal language. Food equals home, and food equals identity, and with each of these encounters, I learn a little more about what makes the world go round.

I had never heard of “shadow benny” until the A train got stuck one day and the only other person in the car with me was a lady from Trinidad. After we got the formalities out of the way, she described her favorite sauce for grilled meat, and I grabbed my notebook. She even gave me her phone number in case I had trouble finding the herb, and I promised her if I ever wrote a cookbook, it would go in there as “Lana’s A-Train Sauce”.

It’s a delight to meet a plant with such etymology. Its aliases refer to its imagined kinship with coriander, its shape, its tenacity, and its global travels. ‘Shadow benny’ is apparently a patois corruption of ‘chadon bene’, which is French, or maybe church Latin, meaning blessed herb, or shade, depending on who you ask. Most of its names in south east Asia translate into some dig at it for being a foreign interloper and its botanical name (Eryngium foetidum, in case you were wondering) refers to its alleged bad smell. After five minutes of crushing and sniffing and munching on it, I decided that this was just another way to keep us guessing, because it smells great. Certainly not like crushed bedbugs. (No, really. What were those botanists on?)

Fortunately, it doesn’t care whether you unravel the mysteries of its nomenclature or not. The flavor is strong and green, with a definite nod to coriander/cilantro, but also a hint of parsley and lemongrass. Delicious, in other words. I met another lady from Trinidad at the dentist’s office and told her that I had been getting acquainted with it; she uses it chopped with garlic as a seasoning on pretty much everything she cooks, “and it’s goooooood!” I found it laid out ready to be bagged on damp newspaper at one of my favorite grocery stores, after running around Chinatown all day showing bemused store owners a mug shot from its surprisingly skimpy Wikipedia page and having people laugh at my attempts to pronounce garbled versions of its Asian names. I was pretty sure this place would have it, since they specialize in Vietnamese foods, so I could have gone straight there. But why miss out on all the fun?

Lana’s A-Train Sauce
As a sauce in the “serve it on the side” sense of the word, this packs a serious wallop. But Lana also said it made a great marinade, so I experimented with this too. The longer you leave it on the meat, the stronger the flavor and the heat: a taste of it straight out of the blender is a lot hotter than the end result if you use it as a marinade. I tried it first on chicken thighs and left them slathered in the sauce for 40 minutes; after I grilled them, there was a mild but definitely cumulative level of ‘burn’.

2 cups of roughly chopped Shadow Benny (three of Ken Hing Market’s $1 bags)
1/2 a cup of yellow American mustard
the juice and zest of 2 limes
2 Jamaican Hot or Scotch Bonnet peppers, green ones if you can find them, seeds removed
4 teaspoons of kosher salt
1 tablespoon of rice wine vinegar (or other white vinegar)

Place all ingredients in a food processor and blend until smooth, like a mustardy pesto. This recipe will yield a pint of sauce, or enough to marinade 2 large hanger steaks or 15 chicken thighs. I haven’t tried it on fish yet, but I think it’ll be really good on some grouper or snapper.