Home › Vegetables › Fried Parsley
Fried Parsley
1 bunch parsley Salt and pepper to taste Wash, pick and dry the parsley; put into frying basket and immerse in hot Crisco fifteen seconds or until crisp. Drain and sprinkle with salt and pepper. It should be a nice green color. If it turns black it has been too long in the fat.
Green Peas a la Maitre d'Hotel 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 quart shelled peas Salt and pepper to taste 1 tablespoonful lemon juice ½ sprigs mint 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 1 teaspoonful sugar Shell peas and throw into plenty boiling water containing a teaspoonful of salt, sugar, and mint; boil fast until tender, then drain. Mix lemon juice with Crisco, and parsley; stir this among peas, reheat them, and serve at once.
Two short vegetable recipes share this page: a deep-fried parsley garnish and buttered peas made with shortening instead of butter. Both are quick, and both depend on one detail the text glosses over.
- Dry the parsley properlyThis is the hinge. Wet parsley dropped into hot fat spatters violently and steams rather than crisps. Spin it in a salad spinner, then spread it on a towel until the leaves feel papery, not merely blotted.
- Fat temperatureThe original gives no number, though it does supply a visual test: green is right, black means too long. Around 350-365F is a reasonable working range; hotter than that and the fifteen seconds the recipe allows will take the leaves straight past green to black.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a neutral, high-smoke-point alternative to lard and butter. Any neutral frying oil behaves the same way here; the current product is reformulated but still works.
- Fifteen seconds means fifteen secondsFried parsley is done almost the moment it stops sizzling hard. Have the frying basket, a draining rack and the salt ready before the parsley goes in.
- What fried parsley is forOne bunch yields only a small handful of crisp leaves, enough to garnish a platter of fish or cutlets. It is a garnish rather than a side dish in its own right, and the original gives no serving quantity.
- The peas: a quart shelledA quart of shelled peas is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, or about 3-4 lb in the pod. Frozen peas substitute directly and need only two or three minutes.
- Boil fast, uncoveredBoil fast -- The instruction to boil hard in plenty of salted water is the usual advice for preserving color. Cooking uncovered is commonly said to let volatile acids escape rather than dulling the green, though the recipe itself says nothing about a lid. Drain the mint sprigs out with the water rather than serving them.
- The dressing will not emulsifyLemon juice stirred into solid shortening stays as separate droplets rather than combining. Softening the fat first and adding the juice gradually helps, and butter gives a far better result if you are not bound to the book's premise.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a product that had no precedent in their kitchens: a shelf-stable white vegetable shortening that could replace both butter and lard. That explains the odd shape of these two recipes. Fried parsley was an established garnish in nineteenth-century French and Anglo-American cookery, so it makes a natural demonstration of the new fat's high smoke point and clean flavor. Peas a la maitre d'hotel is likewise a borrowed classic "maitre d'hotel butter" is butter worked with lemon juice and parsley and the book simply swaps in Crisco, which is why the dressing behaves less gracefully than the original. The volume's larger argument, made repeatedly in its opening pages, was that a vegetable fat was more economical, more digestible and less prone to rancidity than animal fat; the nutritional case for hydrogenated oils has since reversed entirely, but the recipes survive as a record of how a new industrial ingredient was introduced through familiar dishes.