Parsley Petroselinum crispum
Flat-leaf for flavour, curly for texture. The stalks carry more than the leaves do — keep them back for stock.
6 recipes on this site
Ingredient reference image: AI-generated. Recipe photography is my own.
In the kitchen
It goes in at the end
A soft herb: the flavour compounds are volatile and heat drives them off. Stirred in off the heat it tastes of something. Simmered for twenty minutes it tastes of nothing and turns the colour of pond water.
Chop it dry
Wet parsley bruises under the blade and clumps into a paste that smears rather than scatters. Dry the leaves properly first, use a sharp knife, and cut rather than rock.
Use more than you think
Parsley is usually deployed as a pinch of garnish, which is a waste of it. Treat it as a salad green — a large handful, coarsely chopped — and it stops being decoration and starts being an ingredient.
Beyond the kitchen
COMPANION PLANTING
Left to flower, parsley draws hoverflies and parasitic wasps, which is why it is planted among tomatoes and asparagus in kitchen gardens. The flowering only happens in its second year, so most cooks never see it.
BUTTERFLY HOST PLANT
Black swallowtail caterpillars feed on it almost exclusively in parts of North America. If your parsley is being stripped by a striped green caterpillar, that is what is eating it, and many gardeners plant a spare row for them.
THE GARNISH
The sprig laid beside a restaurant plate is a survival of the old practice of chewing parsley at the end of a meal. The custom long outlived any explanation for it, and by the twentieth century the sprig was pure decoration that nobody ate.
WHY CURLY WON
Curly parsley dominated British and American kitchens for a century largely as garnish. It is often said its ruffled leaf also made it harder to confuse with poisonous lookalikes — plausible, and repeated often, though the documentary trail for it is thin.
A longer history
Parsley is native to the central and eastern Mediterranean and has been in cultivation for well over two thousand years. The Greeks used it more in ritual than in cooking: it was strongly associated with death and with funerals, and the phrase recorded by Plutarch about someone needing parsley meant they were not expected to recover. Victors at the Isthmian Games were crowned with it.
The Romans ate it properly, and also wore it in garlands at banquets in the belief that it held off drunkenness — a belief, not a result. It appears in Charlemagne's ninth-century Capitulare de villis, the list of plants to be grown on imperial estates, which is roughly the point at which it becomes a standard northern European kitchen herb rather than a Mediterranean one.
Both types have been grown since antiquity, but the curly form became overwhelmingly dominant in Britain and the United States from the nineteenth century, while Italy, the Levant and much of Latin America stayed with flat-leaf. Flat-leaf only really returned to Anglophone kitchens in the 1980s, which is why older cookbooks calling for parsley usually mean curly.
FORAGING
Do not pick wild parsley. Several members of the same family — fool's parsley and poison hemlock among them — are seriously toxic and closely resemble flat-leaf parsley at a glance. This is one of the genuinely dangerous lookalike problems in European foraging. Buy it or grow it from seed.
