'The Herb of St. Richard'

Fear & Loathing

I have never claimed that my loathing of parsley is rational, but it is deep, and it abides.

I’m sure it started, as so many of these things do, with trauma in childhood. No, I was never thrashed with a bunch of dried parsley stalks by a pederastic choirmaster, I never watched a beloved relative choke to death on the stuff.

The dark ground in which my hatred germinated, was made fertile with boil-in-the bag cod. My Great Grandmother used to prepare it by hanging ‘the bag’ in her electric kettle, off a knitting needle. It saved fuel, I suppose. And after she’d slithered it out of the bag onto a plate, she would gum it with relish.

There were two kinds, if I can reexamine this psychological scar without re-opening that Great Wound: ‘Cod in Mornay Sauce’ which was the colour of teeth in a mug on a bedside table, managed to smell both fishy and cheesy simultaneously, a cocktail you’d usually encounter only in a corpse. ‘Cod in Parsley Sauce’ was additionally the colour of gangrene.

Later, I got my first kitchen job. I must have been around 14, a potwash of staggering ineptitude, paid - rarely - in small amounts of cash, but mainly food. Most of my work was too horrible to recall and has mercifully been excised from my mind, but a high point was ‘Doing the Garnitures’. The least repellent of the tasks.

I had to lay out three hotel pans before service. One was tinned pineapple and glace cherry, to go with the gammon. One was ‘salad’. A single leaf of lettuce, a weeping quarter of over or under-ripe tomato and a slice off a detumescent cucumber. The third was The Parsley (pronounced “PAAs-lay” with a soft S, by the chef Clive. A truly rum cove who’d been drummed out of the RAF for unspeakable crimes, went on to run a successful chain of sex shops, bought a small hotel in Bournemouth on the profits and became a Jehovah’s Witness.

I had to wash the parsley, shake it dry, throw away the rotted bits, bunch the sprigs in threes and lay them out for easy access. Christ alone knows what Clive’s training was, but he was a pretty good cook by the standards of the time and, as was the prevailing doctrine of those halcyon days, was congenitally incapable of letting anything over the pass lacking ‘a bit of green’.

It was bizarre. Nobody would tell me why.

It tasted like it had bolted in a suspiciously damp place behind the chemical toilet on a building site... or soap. It enhanced nothing. It provided no accent, no counterpoint, no surprise nor joy. It was just ‘a bit of green’.

The first time a girl took me out for dinner (her dad owned another hotel nearby. She was called Liz and looked like young Bacall in Key Largo. The words ‘above my pay grade’ seem inappropriate when I wasn’t getting paid enough to take her out for dinner... but it’s nonetheless true. She was radiant. I was scabrous. I was base and unwholesome. My motives were impure and my mind vile. Most shamefully, I was impolite) but there was parsley on the Steak Diane, so perhaps in some ineffable Freudian way, my loathing of parsley was finally cemented by sexual incompetence and humiliation.

I have hated parsley in way you mortals cannot conceive. It ruins a jambon de Paris as surely as a chine de Lincolnshire. It is horrid with fish meat or poultry. I’ve seen great shoals of it scraped into pig bins when self evidently, no punter knew what the hell to do with it either. I made a parsley soup once. It somehow gave me, bowel-tearing, near-terminal squits.

I loved Pogles Wood, Ivor the Engine and the Clangers but I could never watch anything with a lion in called ‘Parsley’. I’m sure Paul Simon was a lyricist without peer but the fucker was a Parsley apologist of the first rank and I cannot love him.

I reserve nothing but the profoundest respect for St. Rick Stein. I still can’t decide whether I admire him most for his cooking, his charming and easy manner, his erudition or his comprehensive misanthropy. I will die, unsuccesful in my attempts to match him in any of those four fields. But the man is unsound on parsley. He hurls that shit on everything. He strews it hither and yon like Cleopatra’s handmaidens with the bloody rose petals. He puts it in things, on things and I swear I once watched the man tuck it under something.

Does he own shares in Big Parsley? Is he like that bloke Hellman, and his covert cabal of mayonnaise billionaires, who secretly own Pret a Manger so they can push the slop within 300m of schools.

St. Rick’s Herb!

WT actual F is the man’s Agenda?