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Sorrel Soup
Take two or three handfuls of fresh green sorrel; pick the leaves from the stems, wash them in several waters, drain them, and put them into a saucepan with a slice of fresh butter. No liquor is required. Steam the leaves gently till quite tender. Dredge a little flour upon them, beat out all the lumps, and add about a quart of either white stock or water. Simmer for ten minutes. Whisk two eggs lightly. Just before the soup is wanted put a little of the soup to the eggs, add the rest gradually, make hot again, but do not boil after the eggs are added. This is an acid soup.
A simple sharp spring soup thickened with egg. The whole thing hinges on the last step: once the eggs go in, the pot must not boil.
- The egg liaisonTemper the beaten eggs with a ladle of hot soup first, then return the mixture to the pan and heat only to about 175F, stirring. Boiling will curdle the eggs into threads and the acid from the sorrel makes them curdle more readily than in a plain stock.
- How much sorrelTwo or three handfuls is roughly 3-4 oz of leaves after stemming, about a bunch or two. Sorrel collapses to almost nothing, so err on the generous side.
- Use a non-reactive panSorrel is high in oxalic acid and will pick up a metallic taste from bare cast iron or unlined copper or aluminium. Stainless steel or enamel is what you want.
- "Steam the leaves gently"With no added liquid, the leaves melt in their own moisture in about five minutes over low heat, turning from bright green to a dull olive. That colour change is unavoidable and not a fault.
- Slice of fresh butter and a little flourAbout 1 oz butter and 1 rounded tablespoon flour suits a quart of stock. Cook the flour into the buttery sorrel for a minute before adding liquid so it does not taste raw.
- A quart of white stockWhite stock here means an unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Unsalted chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; water works but the soup will want more butter and salt.
- "This is an acid soup"A plain note of the soup's character. Sorrel is genuinely tart, so taste before adding anything else acidic, and a little cream or an extra knob of butter softens it if it is too sharp.
- YieldA quart of liquid gives four modest first-course servings. It does not reheat well once the egg is in, so serve it straight away.
Sorrel was a standard kitchen-garden herb in Britain and France long before spinach became common, valued precisely for the sourness that oxalic acid gives its leaves; the plant's older English names include sour dock. Soupe a l'oseille and its egg-thickened variants were fixtures of French domestic cookery, and English soup chapters of the period often drew on French practice. The instruction that "no liquor is required" reflects how wet the leaves are. Sorrel's disappearance from British cooking may owe something to its unsuitability for commercial distribution: the leaves wilt within a day or two of cutting, which may be why it survived mainly as a garden crop.