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Sorrel for Garnishing Meat
Pick three pounds of fresh green sorrel, wash it in several waters, and drain it thoroughly. Put it into a good-sized saucepan with a tea-spoonful of salt and a quart of boiling water, and let it boil quickly till tender, turning occasionally to prevent the lower leaves burning to the bottom of the pan. Drain it well, then chop it till very small. Work an ounce of flour into an ounce and a half of butter, and stir the mixture quickly over the fire for three minutes. Put in the sorrel, and add, a little at a time, half a pint of strong stock. Stir the sorrel over the fire for fully twenty minutes. Beat two eggs with three table-spoonfuls of milk, stir this quickly into the sorrel, and in four or five minutes it will be ready for serving. Time, a quarter of an hour to boil the sorrel.
A classic French-style sorrel purée, thickened with a roux and finished with egg — meant to be spooned alongside veal, pork or duck rather than used as a garnish in the decorative sense.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonOnce the beaten egg and milk go in, the pan must stay below a simmer or the eggs will scramble into threads. Pull it to low heat, stir constantly, and give it two or three minutes rather than four or five if it looks close to setting.
- Use a non-reactive panSorrel is high in oxalic acid and can take on a grey colour and a metallic taste in cast iron, aluminium or unlined copper. Stainless steel or enamelled cast iron is the safer choice.
- Fifteen minutes is far too longFifteen minutes is a long boil -- modern garden or market sorrel collapses into a khaki purée in two to four minutes, and much beyond that only cooks off flavour. You can also wilt it in the water clinging to the leaves rather than a full quart.
- Expect enormous shrinkageThree pounds of raw sorrel is a very large heap of leaves and cooks down to a small fraction of its bulk, though the finished dish, with the stock and eggs added, will still serve a large table. Halve or quarter the recipe unless you are feeding a crowd.
- Stripping the stems"Pick" here means picking over the leaves, not harvesting. Pull the leaf away from the central rib on any mature leaf; the ribs stay stringy no matter how long they cook.
- The rouxAn ounce of flour worked into an ounce and a half of butter is a soft paste, richer in fat than an equal-weight roux. Three minutes over the fire keeps it a white roux -- cook it just until it stops tasting of raw flour, without letting it colour.
- Strong stockHalf an imperial pint is ten fluid ounces, a generous cup and a quarter. 'Strong' here means well-reduced veal or chicken stock; a good unsalted stock reduced by half will do, and salt at the end, since the sorrel has already been salted.
- A note on oxalic acidSorrel's sharpness comes from oxalates, the same compounds found in rhubarb stalks and spinach. A portion alongside a roast is unremarkable, but this is not a vegetable to eat in bowlfuls, particularly for anyone prone to kidney stones.
Sorrel was a kitchen-garden staple in Britain and France long before spinach displaced it, valued precisely for the sourness that makes it awkward now — in an era when lemons were expensive and seasonal, a bed of sorrel gave you acidity all summer. The French treatment, oseille stewed down with butter and flour and bound with egg, closely resembles this entry, and a preparation of this kind was expected to serve a whole family of dishes: under veal, with roast duck or goose to cut the fat, folded into an omelette, or thinned with stock into a soup. Its near-disappearance from British cooking over the twentieth century is often linked to the decline of the domestic kitchen garden — sorrel bruises and wilts fast and never made much of a transition to commercial greengrocery — and it has been reappearing by way of restaurant menus.