Home › The Principles of Cookery › SORREL, PUREE OF (another way)
SORREL, PUREE OF (another way)
Wash and pick some sorrel and some cos or cabbage-lettuces, and put them into a stewpan with a little water: keep stirring with a spoon to prevent them burning; when tender lay them in a hair sieve to drain; then put them on the table, and chop well with some trimmings of mushrooms. When chopped fine, put the vegetables into a stewpan with a little butter and a few small pieces of good ham; let them fry a long time, in order to drain the water they contain. When quite dry, mix them with four spoonfuls of Spanish sauce, or more if a large quantity is required, and stew for a long time over a small stove. After they have been constantly boiling for an hour, rub them through a tamis. If the puree should happen to be too thick, dilute it with a little consomm or stock broth, or Spanish sauce. If too acid, put in a little glaze and sugar. Always put lettuce with the sorrel, to correct its acidity. When you make a puree of sorrel, put a spoonful of flour to thicken the sauce, and dilute with veal gravy, and then proceed as before. If you have no gravy of veal or of beef, two spoonfuls of broth and a small bit of glaze will answer the same purpose.
A classic French purée built on espagnole, written for a kitchen with a stockpot always going. The essentials translate cleanly if you know what the old sauce names and sieves mean.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole: brown stock thickened with a brown roux and flavoured with mirepoix and (in most nineteenth-century versions) tomato. A 'spoonful' here is probably about a tablespoon, though the book fixes no measure. A well-reduced brown stock or a good demi-glace stands in for it.
- GlazeGlaze here is glace de viande, stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A teaspoon or so is enough to round out acidity; commercial demi-glace concentrate does the same job.
- Cos lettuceCos is romaine. The instruction to always add lettuce is the hinge of the recipe — sorrel alone is aggressively sour, and the lettuce is there purely to blunt it. The recipe gives no proportions, so judge by taste.
- Non-reactive pansSorrel is high in oxalic acid and will pick up a metallic taste and grey colour from bare cast iron or unlined copper. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron throughout.
- Sorrel collapsesIt wilts to almost nothing very quickly. The recipe calls for a little water in the pan; sorrel alone would need none beyond what clings after washing, though the lettuce takes longer to soften. The volume loss is dramatic — start with far more than seems reasonable.
- Frying out the waterThe long fry with butter and ham is the step that decides the texture. Cook until the mass no longer weeps and begins to catch faintly on the pan, or the finished purée will be thin and grassy.
- Tamis and hair sieveA tamis is a drum sieve worked with a wooden mushroom; a hair sieve is a fine horsehair-mesh strainer used for draining. A fine chinois, or a food mill followed by a fine sieve, gives the same result with less labour.
- Cooking timesThe hour after the sauce goes in is for flavour and reduction, not tenderness. The recipe asks for constant boiling; on a modern hob keep it at a steady low boil and stir often, as the purée is thick and scorches easily.
Sorrel purée is one of the workhorse preparations of nineteenth-century French cooking, and this entry reads like professional French kitchen writing of the period — the appeal to Spanish sauce, veal gravy and glaze assumes a kitchen where all three are simmering already. Sorrel itself was a staple of English and French kitchen gardens long before it became a restaurant flourish; its sharpness comes largely from oxalic acid, which rhubarb also contains, and this recipe handles it the way cooks commonly did, by blunting it with a bland green. The quantities stay vague throughout, and the reader is simply told to make more if a large quantity is required. The dish survives mainly as an accompaniment to shad and other oily river fish, a pairing often associated with the Loire, and in the sorrel sauces that returned to fashion in French restaurants in the 1960s and 70s.