The Gastrographer
Mapping Culinary History
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Journey Point Map Key
Parsley
Petroselinum crispum
🌍Origin
Eastern and Central Mediterranean — Gathered wild and taken into cultivation since deep antiquity in the eastern and central Mediterranean (Greece, the Balkans, and the islands)
🌱Domestication
Parsley is the odd one out amongst the great culinary herbs, for it belongs not to the mint family of basil, thyme, sage, and oregano but to the Apiaceae, the carrot and celery family, the cousin of dill, coriander, fennel, and lovage. It is a single species, Petroselinum crispum, a biennial of the rocky Mediterranean coast, and its name records that habitat exactly: the Greek petroselinon, 'rock celery', from petra, a rock, and selinon, the celery-and-parsley plant. Native to the eastern and central Mediterranean, to Greece, the Balkans, the islands, and the North African shore, it was known to the ancients long before it was much eaten, and it has since become, in its several forms, the most widely used culinary herb in the whole of the Western world. Though it is one species, parsley is grown in three quite distinct forms, divergent cultivated varieties that arose through long European selection rather than separate wild origins. Flat-leaf, or Italian, parsley (P. crispum var. neapolitanum) has broad, deeply cut, dark leaves and the fullest, most pungent flavour; it is the cook's parsley of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the parsley of tabbouleh, gremolata, persillade, and chimichurri. Curly parsley (var. crispum), with its tightly frilled, mossy leaves, is milder and more decorative, the garnish parsley of the northern European and Anglo-American table and the herb of the English parsley sauce. And root, or Hamburg, parsley (var. tuberosum) is grown not for its leaves at all but for its swollen, parsnip-like white root, a winter vegetable of the German, Polish, and Central European kitchen, where it flavours the great clear soups. Three forms, one plant, and between them the whole range of the herb's uses, from the chopped-leaf finish of a French dish to the soup pot of a Polish winter. Parsley's leaves are rich in vitamins C and K, in iron, and in the aromatic oils apiole and myristicin that give the herb its clean, green, peppery bite, and they have a long-standing and genuine reputation as a breath freshener and a diuretic. But the plant has always had a strange, dark glamour about it too, for its seeds are famously slow and capricious to germinate, taking weeks to appear, and from that simple horticultural fact grew a whole web of folklore: that the seed must travel down to the Devil and back, seven times, before it will sprout; that it can be sown safely only on Good Friday, the one day the Devil has no power over the soil; that only a witch, or the true mistress of the house, can grow it; and that to transplant a parsley bed, or to give it away, is to invite misfortune or death. No other kitchen herb is so bound up with the grave and the Devil, and none is so universally loved at the table.
⛵Global Voyage
Parsley's journey begins in the symbolic world of the ancient Greeks, who held the herb in awe but rarely on the plate. To the Greeks parsley, and its near-relative wild celery, was the plant of death and of victory both: woven into the wreaths laid upon tombs and the crowns of the dead, and equally into the chaplets that crowned the victors of the Nemean and Isthmian Games, as bay crowned the Olympians. The plant was said to have sprung from the spilled blood of the infant Archemorus, and the grim proverb 'to be in need of parsley' meant to be at death's door. It was Rome that brought parsley to the table: the Romans cooked with it, recorded it in the recipes of Apicius, wore garlands of it at banquets in the belief that it absorbed the fumes of wine and staved off drunkenness, and carried the herb with their legions across the empire, into Gaul, Germania, and Britain, where it took permanent root in the kitchen gardens of the Roman world and the monasteries that followed. Through medieval Europe, wrapped in its Devil-haunted folklore, parsley quietly diverged into its three forms, and each found its heartland. In the eastern Mediterranean it remained the bold flat-leaf herb, and in the Levant it rose to a height it reached nowhere else, becoming not a seasoning but a main ingredient: tabbouleh, the great Lebanese and Syrian salad, is a dish of parsley, finely chopped by the bunch, with only a little bulgur, mint, tomato, and lemon to support it, and parsley runs through the whole world of the Levantine mezze. In Turkey it is maydanoz, the herb of kısır and the kebab house; and eastward in Persia it joins the sabzi, the great bundles of fresh herbs that the Iranian kitchen treats as a food in itself, in kuku sabzi and ghormeh sabzi and the herb plate of every meal. In the western Mediterranean and beyond, parsley became the indispensable background herb of European cooking. In Italy flat-leaf parsley is the prezzemolo of gremolata, the bright parsley-lemon-garlic rubble strewn over osso buco, of salsa verde, and of the soffritto that begins half the dishes of the country. In France it is one of the cornerstones of the kitchen, the persillade and the fines herbes, the bouquet garni and the maître d'hôtel butter, the green heart of jambon persillé and the snails of Burgundy. In England the curly form became the garnish of the nation and the basis of parsley sauce and the green parsley liquor of London's pie and mash. In Germany and across Central Europe the root form flavours the clear soups of winter, and Frankfurt built an entire dish, grüne soße, around a fistful of fresh herbs in which parsley leads. And carried across the Atlantic by Italian and Spanish emigrants, parsley became the defining herb of the Argentine asado in chimichurri, the sharp green sauce of parsley, oregano, and garlic spooned over grilled beef. From a Greek funeral wreath to an Argentine grill, parsley has travelled into very nearly every kitchen on earth.
🍽Modern Culinary Role
Parsley is, quite simply, the most widely used culinary herb in the Western world, the green that finishes more dishes than any other. Its three forms divide the work between them: bold flat-leaf parsley for cooking and for the dishes in which the herb is a true ingredient; mild curly parsley for the garnish and the sauce; and the white root for the winter soup pot of Central Europe. As a flavour it is the great supporting herb, the clean, peppery, grassy note that lifts and freshens almost anything, stirred in at the last moment so its colour and life are not lost, and it is the backbone of a whole family of green herb sauces that span the world: the Italian gremolata and salsa verde, the French persillade, the Levantine tabbouleh, the Argentine chimichurri. It is a cornerstone of the classical European kitchen, one of the herbs of the bouquet garni and the fines herbes, the maître d'hôtel butter and the persillade, and it is fundamental to the cooking of the Middle East and Persia, where it is treated less as a seasoning than as a green vegetable, eaten by the handful. In Central Europe the root parsley remains a beloved winter vegetable, and the curly leaf the universal garnish of the Anglo-American plate. Nutritionally parsley is exceptional, dense in vitamins C and K and in iron, and it keeps its old reputation as a breath freshener (the sprig beside the garlicky dish is no accident) and a gentle diuretic. For all its humble, everyday ubiquity, it remains the herb that, more than any other, says fresh, green, and finished, the last bright note struck over the top of a dish, the most familiar and most useful green in the kitchen.