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Parsley, to Preserve, through the Winter
Use freshly-gathered parsley for keeping, and wash it perfectly free from grit and dirt; put it into boiling water PARSNIP SOUP. which has been slightly salted and well skimmed, and then let it boil for 2 or 3 minutes; take it out, let it drain, and lay it on a sieve in front of the fire, when it should be dried as expeditiously as possible.
Store it away in a very dry place in bottles, and, when wanted for use, pour over it a little warm water and let it stand for about 5 minutes.
SEASONABLE. This may be done at any time between June and October.
This is blanch-and-dry, the standard Victorian method for keeping green herbs, and it works — the brief boil sets the chlorophyll so the leaf dries green rather than hay-coloured. Two notes on the text itself before anything else.
- The stray line"PARSNIP SOUP." partway through the first sentence is a page heading or neighbouring recipe title picked up in transcription. Ignore it; the sentence runs straight from "put it into boiling water" to "which has been slightly salted."
- The hinge: dry it fast"As expeditiously as possible" is the whole instruction. Wet blanched parsley left to dawdle in a warm damp spot goes brown and musty. Spread it in a single thin layer and get moving air over it; a 100-120F oven with the door cracked, or a dehydrator on its lowest setting, does in an hour or two what the Victorian kitchen fire did unevenly.
- "In front of the fire"An open hearth gave dry radiant heat plus a strong updraught up the chimney — effectively a low convection oven. Do not try to reproduce it by setting the sieve near a modern radiator, which supplies heat without airflow.
- Skimming the waterThe recipe calls for the boiling water to be "slightly salted and well skimmed." Scum or fat carried on the leaf is no help in storage, since fat can go rancid.
- Two or three minutes is longFor flat-leaf or curly parsley, 15-30 seconds in fully boiling water is generally enough to fix the colour; the longer boil here will leach a good deal of flavour from tender modern bunches.
- Bottles and moistureStore in glass with a tight lid, and only once the parsley is brittle enough to crumble. Any flex left in the stems means residual water, which will fog the glass and grow mould. Keep it dark — light bleaches dried herbs faster than age does.
- ReconstitutingThe warm-water soak for five minutes is right for a garnish or a sauce where you want distinct green flecks. If the parsley is going into a soup, stew or stuffing, add it dry and let the dish do the rehydrating.
- QuantityParsley loses roughly four-fifths of its weight in drying. A large market bunch, say 4 oz of leaf, yields well under an ounce dried — enough to fill a small jam jar loosely and to season a household for a season.
Beeton's "seasonable" note — June to October — is the point of the entry. Parsley is a biennial that runs to seed in its second summer, so a nineteenth-century cook working without a heated greenhouse or a grocer's air-freighted supply could not count on a steady supply of fresh green seasoning through the winter months. Drying, salting and potting herbs in high summer was ordinary domestic forethought, and household manuals of the period treat it with the same seriousness as putting down eggs or bottling fruit. The blanch-first refinement was known to give a greener and better-flavoured dried leaf than simply hanging bunches in the roof.