Home › The Principles of Cookery › SORREL SAUCE (another way)
SORREL SAUCE (another way)
Take a few handfuls of sorrel leaves, wash them, and chop them small, adding a few chives or half a small onion. Put them with a piece of butter in a small casserole, cover it, and leave the vegetables to steam. Add enough broth or water thickened with a table-spoonful of flour. Boil the sauce till the sorrel softens. Add a grate of nutmeg, and salt.
A short, sharp green sauce built on the acidity of sorrel rather than on vinegar or lemon. The whole thing takes under fifteen minutes once the leaves are washed.
- "Casserole" means a saucepanIn Cassell's usage the casserole is a small lidded stewpan for the stovetop, not an oven dish. Use a small non-reactive saucepan — sorrel's acid will pick up a metallic taste from bare cast iron or unlined aluminium.
- How much sorrel"A few handfuls" is roughly 4-6 oz (115-170 g) of leaves, which is a large bowlful raw. Sorrel collapses to almost nothing, so what looks like far too much is about right.
- Stem and washStrip out the tough central rib on larger leaves and wash in two changes of water; sorrel is a low, sprawling plant and holds grit.
- The steaming stageA tablespoon or so of butter over low heat with the lid on. The leaves will turn drab olive and slump within two or three minutes — that colour change is normal and not a fault.
- Liquid and thickeningThe tablespoon of flour is best cooked into the butter with the sorrel for a minute before roughly a cup (8 fl oz) of broth or water goes in, whisked in gradually. Adding thickened water to the pan as written works, but is more prone to lumps.
- Don't overboilThe recipe says to boil the sauce till the sorrel softens, which takes only a few minutes. Long cooking flattens the fresh acidity that is the point of the sauce and dulls the colour further.
- Seasoning and balanceSalt at the end, since the broth may already carry plenty. If the sauce tastes aggressively sharp, a small extra knob of butter or a spoonful of cream stirred off the heat rounds it without masking the sorrel.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; on the quantities estimated above it makes roughly a cupful. Traditional partners are poached or fried fish, veal, roast pork, and eggs of almost any kind.
Sorrel (Rumex acetosa) was a standard kitchen-garden green in Britain and France long before lemons were cheap, valued precisely for the oxalic acid that makes it taste sour; its French name, oseille, gives the classic sauce à l'oseille served with shad and other river fish. The book prints more than one version of the sauce — hence "another way." Sorrel became uncommon in British greengrocers over the twentieth century, as bottled lemon juice and vinegar did much of the same work, and it has come back mainly through farmers' markets and kitchen gardens. Eaten in ordinary sauce quantities it is unremarkable; it is only in very large amounts that its oxalic acid becomes a concern, which is one reason old books treat it as a seasoning green rather than a vegetable to be served on its own.