Parsley
Parsley (Petroselinum crispum) is an upright branching biennial herb (though generally cultivated as an annual) reaching a height of 80cm with divided, feathery green leaves and yellow-green flowers growing in umbels.
It is native to the Mediterranean region. The fruits are ovoid and compressed and split readily into two mericarps, which range up to 2mm long by 1–2mm wide. All parts of the plant are edible, but it is mainly used as a herb and the seeds rarely used as spices. This is curious, as other herbs/spices of the Apiaceae family typically have their seeds widely used for culinary purposes. The flavour of parsley can be described as mildly spicy, slightly bitter, fresh and herb-like; its mild nature enables it to pair easily with other herbs and seasonings. The two most common types of cultivated parsley are the curly and flat-leafed varieties. There is another variety called Hamburg Parsley, or turnip-rooted parsley (P. crispum Radicosum group), on account of its thick taproot, which is popular as a vegetable in central and eastern Europe.The generic term Petroselinum means ‘rock celery’, which emphasises the similarities of the two plants. Even Theophrastus (fourth to third century BCE) recognised the differences between ‘mountain celery’, i.e. parsley, ‘horse celery’ or alexanders, and ‘marsh celery’ or smallage.171
Pliny was very enthusiastic about the diverse benefits: ‘Parsley is held in universal esteem; for we find sprigs of it swimming in the draughts of milk given us to drink in country-places; and we know that as a seasoning for sauces, it is looked upon with peculiar favour.’172
Pliny also listed numerous health benefits attributed to parsley. However, he quoted Dionysius and Chrysippus, who agreed that ‘neither kind of parsley should be admitted into the number of our aliments; indeed, they look upon it as nothing less than sacrilege to do so, seeing that parsley is consecrated to the funereal feasts in honour of the dead’.
This association with death is long-standing (from the time of Ancient Greece) and has continued throughout history. The mythological killing of the infant Opheltes by a serpent was associated with parsley (or celery), the infant being laid on a bed of it, or the parsley growing from his spilt blood. Either way, Opheltes was later renamed Archemorus, meaning the Beginning of Doom – not a nice name for a child, but establishing the association with death. The Nemean Games were created to commemorate this event. So many legends persisted throughout the following millennia, and in many countries. For example, the slow germination of parsley was ascribed to the seeds having to go to hell and back multiple times. Parsley’s association with dubious folklore, superstition and bad luck is also characteristic, tragically exemplified by the case of an Argentinian woman as recently as 2018 who put parsley stems into her vagina to try to induce a miscarriage – she became badly infected and died.Parsley seeds were used by Apicius in spiced salts, but elsewhere greens were more commonly employed, appearing in recipes for cumin sauce, laser sauce, in Oxygarum (a vinegar and fish pickle digestive), in Lucanian sausages, in a dish of porpoise forcemeats, in sauces for fowl, in a sauce for roast flamingo, and numerous others.
Parsley appears to have been introduced to Britain by the Romans.173 In the 2008 study referred to previously, parsley was present in Roman sites from almost exclusively major town contexts, especially London and York in England and Xanten in Germany, all important legionary bases, suggestive of a military association.174 Parsley was absent from early medieval sites, perhaps indicating that it failed to catch on after the Romans left, though by medieval times it had become widespread (in archaeobotanical terms at least).
Chicken with a parsley and bread stuffing is an old Anglo-Saxon dish, and certainly parsley was readily available in that period.
It is listed among the plants in the monastery garden of St Gall.Parsley appears in the fourteenth-century classic The Vision of Piers Plowman, in the context of a poor simple farmer, who has no money for luxuries, in a conversation with Hunger:
And besides I say by my soul I have no salt bacon,
Nor no little eggs, by Christ, collops for to make.
But I have parsley and leeks and many cabbages …175
Set in a century when half of England’s population was wiped out by the Great Famine and the bubonic plague, this austere characterisation still resonates.
In The Forme of Cury (1390) it is used as a herb in many dishes, mainly as greens, but root was also used, e.g. in the dish ‘compost’. Both parsley and parsley roots are used in several recipes from an ‘Anonymous Tuscan Cookbook’ (c. 1400).176 Parsley (assumedly the greens) occurs in numerous recipes in Arundel manuscript 334 dated to c. 1425, where it is referred to as ‘parsell’, ‘parcel’ or ‘parsyly’.
Given the foregoing, the notion of the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus that parsley was introduced to England in 1548 appears flawed – especially so given that the archaeobotanical evidence for parsley supports its establishment in Britain since Roman times.177
In The Good Housewife’s Jewel of 1596 it is again very commonplace, and also in most other contemporary early modern cookery books.178 Its popularity as a culinary herb never really waned through to the modern era.
Alan Davidson describes it as the most popular herb in European cookery.179 Well-known examples of modern European usages include persillade, a sauce mixture of parsley, chopped garlic, oil, etc. (France); parsley sauce (UK); gremolata – chopped parsley, lemon zest and garlic (Italy). It is also extremely popular in west Asia and the Middle East: it is an important ingredient of the Lebanese salad dish tabbouleh, commonly included in falafel, the Iranian herb omelette Kookoo Sabzi and many others. In Mexico it is an essential ingredient of salsa verde.