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Sorrel Salad
Take a quart of fresh green sorrel; pick the leaves from the stalks, but on no account cut them; wash them well, and drain and dry them thoroughly. Pile them in a salad-bowl, and send any simple salad sauce to table with them.
A three-line salad whose whole method is in the handling: sorrel is fragile, sour and quick to collapse, so nothing is cut and nothing is dressed until it reaches the table.
- Do not cut the leavesThis is the hinge. Sorrel is high in oxalic acid and bruises and blackens where the cell walls are torn, and a knife blade drags juice across the cut edge. Pinch or pull each leaf from its stalk with your fingers and leave it whole.
- A quart of sorrelThe quart is a loose volume of leaves, not a weight — perhaps 2 to 3 oz of leaves, though note the recipe measures the quart first and picks the leaves from the stalks afterwards. Enough for a small side salad for two or so.
- Finding sorrelLook for garden or common sorrel (Rumex acetosa) or the smaller, shield-leaved French or buckler-leaf sorrel, at farmers' markets in spring. Supermarket "sorrel" in the Caribbean sense means hibiscus and is a different plant entirely. Young leaves are best; older ones turn coarse and aggressively sour.
- Drying thoroughlySorrel holds water in its folds and a wet leaf both dilutes the dressing and speeds the wilting. Spin it in a salad spinner, then lay it on a towel; handle it as you would chervil rather than romaine.
- "Any simple salad sauce"The recipe does not specify; a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper, or a cream-and-lemon one, would answer. Sorrel supplies its own sharpness, so go light on the acid; a little cream or a soft-boiled egg mashed into the oil suits it better than more vinegar.
- Dress at the last momentNote that the sauce is sent to table separately. Dressing makes tender leaves slump within minutes, so pile the leaves in the bowl and let each person dress their own.
- A note on oxalatesSorrel is a normal salad plant, but it is oxalate-rich and best eaten in modest quantity, especially by anyone advised to limit oxalates. Serving it raw as here, without a metal-heavy pan, avoids the grey discolouration reactive pans cause when it is cooked.
Sorrel was a kitchen-garden staple in Britain and France long before lemons were cheap, valued precisely for the sourness its Latin name records \— Rumex acetosa, from acetum, vinegar. English cooks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used it in green sauces for fish and pork and beat it into "green sauce" or sorrel pulp much as one might use lemon juice now; by the time Cassell's Dictionary appeared in the late Victorian decades, sorrel appears largely in soups, pur\ées for veal or eggs, and salads like this one. The entry is characteristic of the book: it exists less to give quantities than to record the correct handling of a delicate ingredient, the instruction "on no account cut them" being the only thing the cook really needs to be told.