Ingredient

Parsley

Parsley is treated as a garnish and used as one, which wastes it. Flat-leaf parsley in quantity — a whole bunch, chopped, stirred through something at the end — is a proper ingredient with a clean, green, peppery flavour, and it is the herb that most reliably makes a dish taste brighter.

Flat-leaf and curly

Related, and used quite differently.

Flat-leaf

Stronger, cleaner, more peppery. The cooking parsley. What Italian, Middle Eastern and most modern British recipes mean.

Curly

Milder, slightly bitter, with a firmer, more textural leaf. Traditional in British cooking, in parsley sauce and as a garnish. Holds up better to being chopped in advance.

Hamburg parsley

Grown for its parsnip-like root rather than its leaves. A different proposition entirely, and good roasted.

The stalks

More strongly flavoured than the leaves and worth keeping. Chop them finely into a soffritto, or add them whole to a stock.

Substituting

Curly for flat-leaf works at a pinch, though it is milder. Neither substitutes for coriander, which tastes nothing like it.

A herb rather than a decoration

The commonest mistake with parsley is quantity. A teaspoon scattered over a finished dish does very little; a full handful stirred through the same dish changes it.

It is one of the few herbs that works in genuine bulk. Tabbouleh is a parsley salad with a little bulgur in it, not the reverse. Salsa verde, gremolata, persillade and chimichurri are all essentially chopped parsley with something sharp.

Because it is comparatively mild it does not dominate the way basil or coriander would at the same volume, which is exactly why it can be used so heavily.

What to do with a whole bunch

• Gremolata — parsley, lemon zest and garlic, chopped together and scattered over anything braised. Two minutes, and it lifts a heavy dish completely.
• Salsa verde — parsley, capers, anchovy, mustard, vinegar and oil. For fish, lamb, boiled beef or potatoes.
• Tabbouleh, where parsley is the main ingredient and bulgur the seasoning.
• Persillade — parsley and garlic — thrown into a pan of potatoes or mushrooms in the last thirty seconds.
• Parsley sauce for ham or fish, made with curly parsley and a béchamel.
• Deep-fried whole, briefly, until crisp — an old-fashioned garnish that is genuinely good.
• Stalks into stock, or finely chopped into the base of a soup.

Keeping a bunch alive, and chopping it

1. Treat it like a bunch of flowers. Trim the stem ends and stand it in a glass with an inch of water, loosely covered with a bag, in the fridge.
2. Change the water every couple of days. A bunch will last well over a week this way and a few days in a bag.
3. Wash it before chopping, not before storing. Wet parsley in a bag rots.
4. Dry it properly — a salad spinner, or a tea towel shaken hard. Wet leaves bruise and go black under a knife.
5. Use a sharp knife and chop rather than mince. Repeatedly hacking at parsley crushes it, releases the juice and turns it to green paste.
6. Chop it as close to serving as you can. Its aroma fades quickly once cut.

Common questions