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Parsley Pickled Green

A pickled parsley dish preserved in a brine and vinegar with spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Parsley Pickled Green

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Brine the parsley

  1. Make a strong brine that will float an egg and add the curled parsley.

  2. Let it stand for a week.

  3. Make a fresh brine and let it stand for another week.

Soak and scald

  1. Drain the parsley and soak it in spring water for three days, changing the water daily.

  2. Scald the parsley in boiling water until green, then drain it.

Pickle and store

  1. Boil the vinegar with mace, nutmeg, and shallots for a few minutes, then let it cool.

  2. Pour the cooled vinegar over the parsley and add horseradish slices.

  3. Store for use.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Nutmeg + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Curled parsley
Is the main ingredient being preserved, and it turns green when scalded.
Distilled vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the parsley and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Shallots
Add a mild onion-like aroma to the pickling vinegar.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent flavour to the pickled parsley.

The step that matters

Scalding the parsley until green. Scalding briefly in boiling water sets the bright green colour and softens the leaves. Scalding too long will dull the colour and make the parsley limp.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, egg, vinegar, nutmeg, shallot, horseradish):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, egg, vinegar, nutmeg, shallot, horseradish. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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