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TO KEEP PARSLEY FRESH AND GREEN
Put it in a strong boiling hot pickle of salt and water, and keep for use. Hang up and dry in bunches, blossom downward, in a dry attic or store-room, for use in soups, stuffing, etc.
Two separate methods are packed into three lines, and only one of them holds up. The brine half gives no quantities, no vessel and no storage temperature, which is precisely the gap that makes it unusable.
- "Pickle" here means brineIn nineteenth-century usage a pickle is often simply a salt-and-water solution rather than a vinegar preserve. Nothing acidic is involved, and no salt quantity is given; the recipe also names no vessel or seal, so the storage conditions are left entirely open.
- The brine strength is unstated"Strong" could mean anything from a weak solution to full saturation. Salt-brined herbs held at room temperature depend entirely on that concentration being high enough throughout, and an under-salted brine in a closed container is a known environment for Clostridium botulinum, which may give no smell or off taste to warn you.
- Boiling hot is not processingPouring hot brine over greens is not a heat process. It wilts the parsley and warms the jar; it does not sterilise the contents, and the recipe gives no seal, no processing time and no cool storage. If you want salted or brined herbs, follow a current tested recipe with weighed salt.
- The drying method is a different thing entirelyThe second sentence describes ordinary air-drying and is still sound practice. Small loose bunches, stems up and heads down, in a dark, dry, airy spot; parsley dries in one to two weeks and keeps its colour better away from light.
- Why "blossom downward"Hanging inverted is the traditional practice; the reasons usually given are that it keeps the bunch open rather than clumped so moisture is not trapped, and that the stems' oils run toward the leaves, though the latter is tradition rather than demonstrated fact. A dry attic or store-room stands in for what most kitchens now lack: an unlit, well-ventilated drying space.
- Dried parsley is not fresh parsleyDespite the title, drying costs most of the aroma. Dried parsley earns its place in long-simmered soups and stuffings, as the recipe says, and not in anything where the herb is meant to taste green. Modern practice is to freeze chopped parsley for that purpose.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (first published in Ohio in 1877 and reprinted repeatedly through the 1880s) was assembled from contributions by many households, which is why short preserving notes like this one turn up in odd chapters and why two unrelated methods can share a single paragraph. Both techniques predate the book by centuries: salting greens down in brine crocks and hanging herbs in the rafters were the two standard ways of carrying a summer herb garden through a northern winter, and parsley, a biennial that dies back hard, was a common candidate. The advice to hang bunches head-down in a dry attic reflects a house that had one — unheated, dark and drafty, the same space used for drying apples, seed corn and onions. What the entry does not have, and what no home recipe of the 1870s could have had, is any notion of measured salt concentration: the germ theory of food spoilage was only then taking hold, and although botulism had been described in the medical literature by Justinus Kerner in the 1810s and 1820s, the organism responsible was not identified until van Ermengem's work in 1895.