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SORREL, STEWED (a la Franoise)
Take a peck of sorrel, fresh and green; pick off the stems, and wash the leaves in several waters; put them into a stewpan with a pint of boiling water in which a table-spoonful of salt has been dissolved, and let them boil quickly till tender. Some cooks put a shredded lettuce and a little chervil into the saucepan with them. Drain the water from it, and rub the sorrel through a wire sieve. Put it into a saucepan, and mix with it two ounces of butter, a dessert-spoonful of flour, and a little pepper. Stir it over the fire till it boils. Cool, then add three table-spoonfuls of cream, or the well-beaten yolks of two eggs, and serve with hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters. Time to boil the sorrel, a quarter of an hour. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A French purée of sorrel, thickened with butter, flour and either cream or yolks. The one thing to change is the timing: sorrel collapses in about two minutes, and the quarter-hour boil here comes from an era that cooked all greens to submission.
- A peck of sorrelA peck is a dry measure of about 9 litres by volume — a large basketful of loose leaves, which cooks down to roughly 1.5 to 2 lb (700–900 g) trimmed. Sorrel loses most of its bulk almost instantly, so the finished purée from this quantity is modest.
- Cooking timeSorrel needs two to three minutes at most; the leaves break down into a purée on their own the moment they hit heat. Fifteen minutes gives you a flat, sulphurous mush with none of the sharpness that is the whole point of the plant.
- WaterThe pint of salted boiling water is more than necessary. Sorrel is watery enough to stew in what clings to the washed leaves, and less water means less flavour poured down the drain at the draining stage.
- The panSorrel is high in oxalic acid and will take a metallic taste and a grey cast from bare cast iron or untreated aluminium. Use stainless steel, enamelled iron or a non-reactive lined pan.
- Passing it through the sieveA wire sieve and a wooden spoon still work, but a food mill is faster and a stick blender faster still. Do not over-blend if you want any texture at all — well-cooked sorrel is already close to a purée.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons. With two ounces (55 g) of butter this makes a very loose roux, enough to bind the purée rather than thicken it into a sauce.
- Adding the yolks"Cool, then add" matters. Beat a spoonful of the hot purée into the yolks first, return the mixture to the pan, and warm it gently without letting it come back to the boil, or the yolks will scramble through the purée.
- ColourCooked sorrel always turns olive-brown. Nothing prevents it, and recipes promising a green purée are relying on added spinach or herbs. The recipe's optional shredded lettuce and chervil would have the same effect, though it gives no reason for including them.
- ServingSix to seven as a vegetable course or garnish, not as a main dish. Beyond the quartered hard-boiled eggs, the classic partners are veal, roast pork and oily fish, where the acidity does the work of a lemon.
Sorrel — oseille — was a staple of the French kitchen garden long before it was a restaurant ingredient, valued less as a vegetable in its own right than as a built-in souring agent in an era when lemons were expensive and seasonal. A purée like this, bound with butter and finished with cream or yolks, is the standard French treatment, and it appears in English books of the late nineteenth century under headings like "à la française": sorrel had been grown in English gardens for centuries as a pot-herb and salad green, but the taste for it faded as milder spinach took over the ground. The pairing with hard-boiled eggs is old and practical — the richness of the yolk answers the acid directly — and the same logic explains sorrel's long association with shad and other oily fish.