When did restaurants stop putting parsley on the plate?

Restaurants around here do not put water on the table anymore. You have to ask for it. So I guess that small piece of parsley and the glasses of water are their way to save money.

Because no one was eating it.

A neighbor of mine told me a story about parsley nearly 50 years ago – possibly apocryphal – that I have remembered to this day. That’s just your bad luck.

Apparently, soon after Elizabeth was crowned Queen of England, sometime in the mid 1950s, she went to Iceland for a state visit which included a dinner in her honor. At the time, Iceland didn’t have much of an agricultural (land-based) industry, but they did have greenhouses, and they did raise parsley as one of their very few island-raised vegetable items.

The Icelanders determined to put on the best Icelandic dinner that they could. It featured fish caught in Iceland’s waters, plus some vegetables and potatoes that were also grown in nearby greenhouses. There was a local competition across the island to see who would provide the various items of the highest quality to serve to the Queen. The parsley was no exception; they served award-winning parsley at the dinner.

When the dinner was served, everything was “just so”, including the artistic placement of the finest, freshest, most beautiful and fragrant sprig of parsley that could be found and trimmed to decorate the Queen’s plate – and which everyone naturally assumed she would consume, since parsley is edible, after all.

The dinner was served and all of the diners waited for the Queen to go first. She did what diners in civilized countries around the world always do when served a dinner in such a manner: She first used her fork and her knife to lift the damned sprig of parsley out of the way of her meal and put it onto an unused saucer, to be removed as soon as it would be possible to do that.

I think the lesson was learned that day about serving parsley on top of food that we expect humans to eat.

Waste of money. It’s just a garnish after all.

They’re saving it to make tabbouleh (if it’s the good flat-leaf parsley). The curly stuff is just silly.

Q: What is the difference between parsley and pussy?

A: Nobody ever eats parsley.

Parsley is a diuretic. I don’t really care for it but I do eat it because of the diuretic effects.

I am a pussy and I don’t eat pussy LOL.