The Herb Bouquet.

Treat soft herbs — parsley, cilantro, dill, chervil, tarragon — exactly like cut flowers. The day you bring the bunch home, trim half an inch off the stems with kitchen shears. Stand the bunch upright in a small drinking glass or short jar with about an inch of cold water. Slip a loose plastic bag — the one the bunch came in works perfectly — over the top, tented like a little greenhouse. Set the whole arrangement in the fridge door, not on a shelf. Change the water every three days, re-trim the stems each time. Ten days. Sometimes fourteen. The bunch you used to throw out on day four now feeds you for two weeks.

Why this works

Soft herbs are aboveground green vegetables that have been cut from their root system, and they wilt for the same reason cut flowers wilt — water can no longer move from soil up through the stem to the leaves. Standing the stems in fresh water rebuilds the capillary draw. The plastic bag tented over the top keeps the local humidity high enough that the leaves don’t lose moisture to the dry fridge air. The fridge door, not a shelf, because the door is the warmest part of the fridge and soft herbs hate near-freezing temperatures — at 35°F (1.5°C) cilantro turns black in two days.

Where it shows up

Friday-night chickpea-milanesa gets a finishing flurry of chopped parsley I cut from the same Sunday-bought bunch I used on Tuesday’s pesto. The sofrito building blocks — the parsley stems go in, the leaves stay back for finishing. The mushroom-kombu-broth takes the dill stems on day seven, when the leaves have started to go but the stems are still aromatic. Nothing in the bunch goes to waste — the stems flavor stocks, the leaves finish plates.

The line I draw

I will not store soft herbs in a damp paper towel inside a sealed plastic bag. The trick everyone repeats on the internet — wash, dry, wrap in paper towel, zip into a bag — works for three days then turns the leaves to slime as soon as the towel saturates. The cut-flower method works for ten. There is no contest.