From Whence Avocado?

Central Mexico.
Both cases.

The Spanish for avocado, "aguacate", comes from Nahuatl "ahuacatl", which means "testicles".

A South American version, called "pagua" was commercialized in Mexico some years ago. Bigger, easier to peel, but not as savory, it failed.

A mixed variety, coming from a pagua-aguacate implant, and called "aguacate Haas", is very common now.

Aguacate in Español but "palta" in peruano. Quite a surprise for me and my colombiana wife reading restaurant menus there. While "cilantro" certainly sounds like a Spanish word my wife heard on TV that it originated in Europe. What´s the scoop on cilantro and is it only an ingredient in Vietnamese cuisine in the U.S. and not in Viet Nam?

I've never seen cilantro in Vietnamese food here, and am an avid fan. Well, maybe I didn't go to enough places.

Maybe I'm confused, but I think coriander is the seed, and cilantro is the leafy green. Maybe that's an old mistake. But if coriander is the seed pod, then it is one well distributed plant, and may have originated in europe.

I love cilantro. Oddly, I also associate it with both Mexican and Southeast Asian cuisine. Maybe the Vietnamese restauranteurs in Toronto came from a different part of Viet Nam than the ones in your area, ossobuca.



from here

Yes, "palta", not "pagua" as I wrote.
Palta is the "unsavory" variety.

It's the Spanish and other empire-building nations. They took native foods from everywhere they colonized and brought them to other colonies. So, chilis from the Americas in Southeast Asian cooking, potatoes in Indian curries, rice in Mexican recipes, etc.

Alligator pear is another name for the avocado.

The American Heritage Dictionary entry for Alligator Pear is:
"By folk etymology from American Spanish aguacate, avocado (the trees are said to grow in areas infested by alligators)."

In the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, the word for the fruit of the avocado tree was 'ahuacatl.' Spanish speakers pronounced it 'aguacate', but other Spanish speakers substituted the form 'avocado' for the Nahuatl word because 'ahuacatl' sounded like the early Spanish word 'avocado' (now 'abogado'), meaning "lawyer." In borrowing the Spanish 'avocado', first recorded in English in 1697 as "avogato pear."

Neither the skin nor the alligators are the sole source of the likely origin of alligator pear. In the opinion of the Oxford English Dictionary, the most likely origin is simply the mispronunciation of the Nahuatl word for the fruit "ahuacatl," and sites the following (among others): 1861 Tylor Anahuac ix. 227 "There is a well-known West Indian fruit which we call an avocado or alligator-pear, and which the French call 'avocat' and the Spaniards 'aguacate.' All these names are corruptions of the Aztec name of the fruit, 'ahuacatl.'"

I believe all three - the skin, the alligators and mispronunciation all contributed to the development of the name 'alligator pear.'