Parsley

Parsley, Petroselinum crispum, is a biennial of the carrot family, native to the Mediterranean and grown everywhere as a culinary herb. Its classical associations are strikingly funereal. The Greeks wreathed victors of the Isthmian and Nemean games in parsley, but they also planted it on graves and made it the emblem of the dead: the phrase to be in need of parsley meant to be at death's door, and it was linked to Archemorus, the infant whose death began the Nemean games, from whose spilled blood parsley was said to have first sprung.

The seed's notorious slowness to germinate, which fed so much of its devil-lore, has a real chemical explanation: parsley seed coats contain furanocoumarin compounds that inhibit and delay germination, a genuine botanical mechanism working exactly the deception the folklore blamed on the devil. In ancient Rome parsley wreaths, distinct from the Greek funeral use, were also worn at banquets in the belief that the leaf absorbed the fumes of wine and staved off drunkenness, a small detail of Roman table manners recorded by Pliny among his miscellany of dining customs, showing how the same funeral herb could double as a dinner-table charm.

Fresh parsley is also, gram for gram, unusually rich in vitamin K and vitamin C compared with most culinary herbs, a modern nutritional fact that has nothing to do with its old funerary and devil-lore reputation but that keeps the humble garnish from being quite as nutritionally idle as its usual fate, pushed to the side of the plate, might suggest.

Culpeper placed parsley under Mercury. Its notoriously slow and erratic germination bred a rich body of folklore: the seed was said to go to the devil and back, seven or nine times, before it sprouted, so that a poor showing was the devil's tithe; and to transplant parsley, or to give a root away, was to invite misfortune or death into the house. These beliefs, and the old warning against a wife who grew parsley too well, cluster around a plant genuinely difficult to raise from seed. Alongside the funeral symbolism and the devil-lore, parsley remained the most ordinary of kitchen herbs, valued plainly for the table.

Parsley also holds a living ritual place at the Jewish Passover seder, where a green vegetable, karpas, most commonly parsley, is dipped in salt water and eaten early in the service, the green read as a sign of spring and rebirth and the salt water as the tears of slavery in Egypt, a use continuing in Jewish households today and quite distinct from the plant's older Greek association with death. The custom is attested in early rabbinic descriptions of the Passover order and remains one of the more universally kept elements of the modern seder across otherwise very different Jewish communities, a single herb once strewn on Greek tombs now marking, in an entirely different tradition, the coming of spring.