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Pickled Parsley
Select perfect, curly heads of parsley, wash thoroughly in salt water, drain and shake till dry. Put into jars of cold vinegar and to each quart allow two tablespoonfuls of chopped horse-radish. Cover and stand away for use.
This is especially nice in winter when it is impossible to get the fresh parsley, and may be used to garnish cold meat dishes, deviled eggs, tomatoes or hot spiced meats. Fresh green parsley may be used as a flavoring for sauces, soups, and all kinds of braised meats, and is the prettiest of all the garnishes.
A cold-pack herb pickle from the era before year-round supermarket produce. It works, but the margin of safety depends entirely on the vinegar staying at full strength.
- Dry the parsley completelyThis is the hinge. Water clinging to the leaves dilutes the vinegar, and a diluted pickle is less reliably self-preserving; 5 percent is the strength usually recommended for pickling. Spin or blot the heads until they are genuinely dry before they go into the jar.
- Use undiluted 5% vinegarPlain distilled white or cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity, straight from the bottle, no water added. Wine vinegars vary and some artisan bottles are weaker than they look; check the label for the acidity figure.
- Store it cold, not in a cupboard"Stand away for use" meant a cool cellar or larder. Keep these jars in the refrigerator and use them within a couple of months. Nothing here is heat-processed, and the leaves were never blanched.
- The salt-water washTraditionally understood as a way of driving out insects hiding in curly parsley, though the recipe does not say so. A tablespoon of salt in a quart of cold water for a few minutes will do; rinse afterwards so the brine does not carry through into the vinegar.
- Horseradish quantityTwo tablespoons of chopped horseradish root for each quart of vinegar, as the text has it. It is there for flavour and bite as much as anything; jarred horseradish already sits in vinegar and will work, though it is milder.
- Jars and lidsVinegar corrodes bare metal. Use glass jars with plastic-lined or plastic lids, and keep the leaves pushed below the surface of the vinegar.
- What to expectThe bright green fades to a dull olive within a week or two, and the texture goes limp. It keeps the flavour, not the look, so it is better chopped into a sauce or scattered over cold meat than used as the showpiece garnish the text suggests.
- YieldA quart jar takes several large bunches once they are packed down.
Parsley was the garnish of the nineteenth-century table, laid round cold joints, pressed against moulded jellies and tucked beside deviled eggs, and its absence in January was a genuine inconvenience for anyone cooking to a standard. Curly-leaved varieties were preferred over flat-leaf, a preference often said to rest on how well they held their shape on a platter. Preserving herbs in straight vinegar was one of several stopgaps in the household repertoire, alongside drying, salting and potting in butter, and it belongs to the same impulse as the mint and nasturtium vinegars that fill the pickle chapters of the period. The horseradish here is doing double duty: it sharpens the flavour, and grated root was widely believed to help keep pickles sound, a piece of kitchen lore that turns up repeatedly in Victorian and Edwardian preserving instructions. The closing note about fresh parsley being "the prettiest of all the garnishes" is a reminder that this is a substitute.