It was once the scourge of toothy smiles, a social-climbing distraction from mediocre meals, and a thorny doctrinal problem for membership in the clean-plate club. And it was everywhere.
But when you want a sprig of curly parsley these days? Best of luck to you. The stuff's persona non grata in restaurant and home kitchens, supplanted by flat-leaf parsley.
"Flat leaf tends to be easier to control, and it isn't as tough," says Jason Potanovich, chef instructor of the American Bounty restaurant at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.. "It became a trend—flat-leaf parsley made an entrance, and curly got left in the dust."
To best understand why curly parsley has fallen so low, it's helpful to remind ourselves why it was once king of the overpriced country-club plate.
As far back as 1974, James Beard was already commenting on the ubiquity of parsley, which then came almost entirely in curly form: "If I had to pick six herbs I couldn't cook without I'd settle for basil, bay leaf, rosemary, savory, tarragon, and thyme," he writes in Beard on Food. "Parsley, too, of course, but that is so universal it goes without saying."
But curly-parsley mania may have only gotten more intense from there, spurred on by Americans' interest in emulating what they saw as the the sophistication of Continental chefs.
"In the '80s and early '90s, everyone was crazy about French cuisine, and the French were all about those little intricacies on the plate, like the tomato rosettes, the curled butter roses, or something fluted—all those intricate garnishes," Potanovich says. "And the French do use the curly parsley a lot to add extra crispiness for frying—it's a very classic addition to use curly parsley for fried fish dishes. But it's visual and textural more than anything."
You don't have to be a student of human excess to realize that if something has the cachet of sophistication, it's only a matter of time before it shows up everywhere. So restaurateurs, chefs, and cooks around the country began sticking curly parsley next to everything they sent out, from dry-aged filets at expense-account steakhouses to Denver omelets at greasy hash houses. Still, no one ever actually seemed to eat curly parsley except that one uncouth guy who'd insist he was cleansing his palate between courses.
"You could use the example of these not-so-great places on, say, Cape Cod, that served burgers and fried fish, and you'd get a clam chowder with two pieces of curly parsley on top, and you're like, 'Okay, great, let me get that stuff out of the way,'" says Fitz Tallon, executive chef of Eataly New York. "Places were literally buying curly parsley by the crate just to put on top of the soup and nothing else. Every once in a while, I'll look in old cookbooks, and if you look at the pictures, you'll see the curly parsley was just a way to fill up the negative space on a plate."
And it certainly didn't hurt its popularity that curly parsley is a relatively hardy plant. In decades when grocers valued their produce more for its ability to withstand cross-country trips in cargo trucks than for its taste, freight-truck-friendly fare like iceberg lettuce, beefsteak tomatoes, and curly parsley dominated our plates.
"It's certainly more hardy than flat-leaf," says Mitchell Davis, executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation. "The whole vegetable-distribution system from California was pretty primitive--it wasn't about the eating, it was about distribution and infrastructure."
And flat-leaf parsley? It simply wasn't an option for most.
"When I first moved here in the late '90s, it was difficult for me to find fava beans or flat-leaf parsley or other products that were normal to me, having grown in Italy," says Fabio Parasecoli, director of food-studies initiatives at the New School. "Now I think you can find them everywhere."
Sometime starting around the early '90s, curly parsley just wasn't doing it anymore for more and more restaurant patrons or home cooks. For decades, cookbook authors, television chefs, and culinary know-it-alls had already been pooh-poohing curly parsley as less flavorful, harder to work with, and generally inferior in every way to its flat-leaf sibling. (Beard was already praising the merits of flat-leaf parsley as "coarser, more roundly flavored" than its "moss-curled" cousin as early as 1949, in The Fireside Cookbook.) Now that parsley elitism was becoming mainstream.
"It was a result of that gourmet snobbery of the '70s that came with food processors and Julia Child, when people were suddenly differentiating themselves as in the know," Davis says. "Because you couldn't really find it anywhere in the 1970s—I remember looking."
And as fussy French food seemed increasingly old-fashioned, the simplicity of rustic Italian food began its ascendance in chefs' hearts. Flat-leaf—otherwise known as Italian—parsley, came along for the ride.
"French cuisine dominated the world of professionals for as long as people could remember, then people realized that had other cuisines they could learn from," Tallon says. "It's not that curly parsley doesn't have its place, but when I think of curly parsley, I think of its as that bunch of curly parsley next to the chicken breast on a concasse of tomatoes that's there solely for garnish. That style of hotel cooking is gone, it's a dying breed."
Meanwhile, the very concept of garnishes was undergoing a revolution, and it didn't help curly parsley's case. Chez Panisse had already been championing the idea that nothing should go onto a plate that wasn't an integral part of the meal. That elegant concept caught on.
"We're getting to the point in the timeline where everything we're putting on the plate should be eaten, where garnishes are functional and should have meaning and round off the whole dish, and aren't just for looks anymore," Potanovich says.
To top it all off, both professional chefs and home cooks simply had more options available to them.
"Why curly parsley when we can use micro-radishes from Blue Moon Acres, or Windfall Farms?" Tallon says. "We're no longer at that point where you get a dish and the first thing you do is have to push away the thing that's on top of something you actually want to eat. Certainly people are trying to waste less and go back to the rustic-cooking idea of using things up before we throw them out, instead of, 'Here's a radish, let's cut it into roses.'"
To top it off, considering the notoriously razor-thin margins of restaurants, extraneous costs like curly-parsley garnishes were an obvious target of budget cuts when the recession hit in 2008, Tallon says.
"It's an unnecessary expense," Tallon says. "Do I need to have this parsley that comes from California shipped to my doorstep to garnish my fish? It doesn't help me financially. Unless you're one of these big hotels and banquet halls, we're moving away from sprucing up really shitty product by sticking curly parsley on buffet scrambled eggs. Instead, just spend that money on a nicer product."
Potanovich argues that putting curly parsley in the corner is our loss. He argues against the common belief that curly parsley is less flavorful than flat leaf: "If a dish calls for flat-leaf parsley as an ingredient and all you have is curly, it's 100-percent substitutable." Davis, meanwhile, notes that it's mostly only the U.S. that curly parsley is relegated to a garnish or herb, whereas Europe and the Middle East deem it worthy of its own salads and parsley-based dishes.
"Curly parsley has gotten kind of a bad rap," Tallon agrees.
But don't count the humbled herb out.
"It's had its day, but I have a feeling curly parsley is going to be trending again soon, but not as a sprig on a plate as decoration," Potanovich says. "It's definitely due for a revival somewhere out there. Maybe that time is now."