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SORREL, PUREE OF (to serve with Cutlets, Roast Veal, etc.)
Wash half a peck of fresh green sorrel in several waters; pick away the stalks, and boil it with half a pint of water till tender, then drain it thoroughly. Slice two large onions, and fry them in butter till they turn yellow; dredge a little flour upon them, and add half a pint of gravy, a small lump of sugar, a pinch of grated nutmeg, and a little pepper and salt. Add the sorrel, and stir it over a gentle fire for twenty minutes, and afterwards rub it patiently through a hair sieve. It may be served in the centre of a dish, with cutlets round it, or as an accompaniment to roast veal, lamb, or mutton. Time to boil the sorrel, a quarter of an hour. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A French-style green sauce that behaves more like creamed spinach than gravy. Two things decide whether it works: the sheer volume of leaves you need, and keeping the acid away from reactive metal.
- Half a peck of sorrelA peck is 8 dry quarts, so this is 4 quarts of loosely packed leaves — roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb, which cooks down to a couple of cups of puree. Sorrel collapses even more dramatically than spinach, so the quantity is not a misprint.
- Cook it in stainless or enamelSorrel is high in oxalic acid and will pick up a grey metallic taste from bare cast iron, aluminium or unlined copper. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron throughout, and a nylon or stainless sieve rather than a tinned one.
- The quarter hour is for old leavesYoung spring sorrel wilts to a khaki puree in two or three minutes with almost no added water. The recipe's fifteen minutes suits coarse late-season leaves; check early and stop as soon as the stalk ribs are soft.
- "Gravy" means brown stockIn a Victorian cookery book this generally means meat gravy or jus, not thickened pan gravy. Half an imperial pint is 10 fl oz, a generous cup and a quarter, of veal or beef stock; reduced stock gives a better body than a bouillon cube, which will read as salty against the acid.
- A small lump of sugarLump sizes cut from a sugar loaf varied, but a teaspoon or so is a reasonable reading of 'a small lump'. It is there to blunt the sourness, not to sweeten — taste at the end and add a little more if the puree makes you wince.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh sieve pressed with the back of a ladle, or a food mill fitted with the medium disc. A blender will emulsify the butter and onion into something paler and looser; the sieve is what gives the classic dense texture.
- Onions to yellow, not brownColour past pale gold and the puree turns muddy rather than green-grey. Keep the heat moderate and let the flour cook a minute in the butter before the stock goes in.
- Yield and servingServes three or four as an accompaniment. Serve it hot, spooned in the middle of the platter with cutlets leaning against it, and keep the portion modest — the acidity is the point.
Sorrel puree is a French kitchen staple, purée d'oseille, and its appearance in an English dictionary of cookery reflects the thorough Frenchification of respectable Victorian cooking. Sorrel was a common kitchen-garden perennial in Britain long before that — the sharp leaves supplied acidity in an era when lemons were an imported luxury, and the plant's older English name, sour dock, describes it exactly. Its role here is the same one gooseberry sauce plays with mackerel or mint with lamb: an acid foil for fatty roast meat, which is why the recipe offers it with veal, lamb or mutton cutlets. Sorrel faded from British greengrocers in the twentieth century, partly because it wilts within a day or two of picking and travels badly, which is why it is now more often found in gardens and farmers' markets than supermarkets.