Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sorrel Sauce
Sorrel Sauce
Pick the stalks and large fibres from a quart of fresh green sorrel, wash it in several waters, drain it, and put it into an enamelled saucepan with a slice of fresh butter, and stew it gently till tender. Stir it well to keep it from burning. Drain it, and rub it through a coarse hair sieve, season with pepper and salt, and add half a tea-spoonful of powdered sugar, the juice of half a lemon, if the sauce is for roast veal; or a spoonful or two of thick brown sauce, if it is for other roast meat; or a little cream, if wanted white for fowls. Serve when hot. Time, a quarter of an hour.
A short, sharp green sauce built on one ingredient, with three finishes depending on what it is going alongside. Most of the work is in the picking and the sieving.
- The enamelled pan is not optionalSorrel is high in oxalic acid, which reacts with bare cast iron, aluminium and unlined copper, turning the sauce grey-brown and metallic. Use enamel, stainless steel or a well-glazed pan, and a wooden or silicone spoon.
- What a quart of sorrel weighsA quart here is a loose volume of picked leaves, perhaps 3 to 4 oz (85-115 g) depending on how tightly they are packed. Sorrel collapses like spinach, so expect it to cook down to a few tablespoons of puree.
- Cooking timeThe stated quarter of an hour covers the whole operation. The leaves themselves melt in three or four minutes over gentle heat with no added liquid beyond the butter and the water clinging from washing; longer than that dulls the acidity and the colour.
- The colour will goSorrel turns from bright green to olive-khaki within a minute of heating, and little can be done to prevent it.
- SievingA coarse hair sieve is a sieve with a woven horsehair mesh, often drum-shaped. A stainless drum sieve, or a fine-mesh strainer and a stiff spatula, does the same job; a blender will not, because the point is to hold back the tough leaf ribs.
- Lemon may be redundantSorrel is already acidic. Taste before adding the juice of half a lemon, and add it in stages; the half teaspoon of sugar exists to round that sharpness, not to sweeten.
- The three finishesPlain with lemon for roast veal, let down with thick brown sauce (a rich made brown sauce or gravy) for other roasts, and slackened with cream for chicken. The cream version is the most forgiving and the one to make if you are unsure.
- Oxalic acid in quantitySorrel eaten as an occasional sauce is unremarkable, but it is worth knowing that large or frequent servings are not advisable for anyone prone to kidney stones.
Sorrel was a standard kitchen-garden herb in Britain and France long before lemons were cheap, and its role was the same: a source of clean acidity to cut fat. The English name descends through Old French surele from a Germanic root meaning sour, and the plant most often grown for the pot is Rumex acetosa, garden or broad-leaved sorrel. Its three variations in Cassell's show the logic of a Victorian sauce repertoire in miniature: one base, adjusted with acid, brown gravy or cream to suit whatever meat came out of the oven. French cooking kept sorrel firmly in the mainstream, in potage germiny and as the classic partner to shad and salmon, while in English kitchens it faded through the twentieth century.