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Meagre Soup
This soup should be of the thickness of ordinary pea soup. Remove the withered leaves from 2 large lettuces, take 5 or 6 handfuls of sorrel, a few sprigs of parsley, and a small bunch of chervil. Shred all of these very fine. Slice and chop some onions, carrots, and leeks; fry until they are lightly browned in butter, then put in a saucepan with boiling water. Add a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, and a large lump of butter, and season with salt and pepper. Stir occasionally to prevent any of the ingredients from sticking to the bottom. When thoroughly cooked press the vegetables through a sieve. Add more water to pulp, if necessary, and let the soup boil again before serving.
A French-style green soup thickened only by its own puree. The one thing to get right is the sorrel: it collapses to almost nothing and carries the whole flavour, so do not reduce it.
- Quantities are by handfulA handful is not a measure, so any weight is a guess: five or six handfuls of shredded sorrel is perhaps half a pound, and two trimmed lettuces roughly a pound. Both cook down to a fraction of their raw bulk.
- Water, unstatedNo liquid measure is given. For the vegetable quantities above, start with about 5 cups of boiling water and hold back more to thin the puree at the end; the finished soup should coat a spoon like split pea soup.
- Sorrel and metalSorrel is high in oxalic acid and turns grey and metallic in bare cast iron or unlined aluminium. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron.
- Sorrel colourIt goes from bright green to olive-khaki within a minute of hitting heat. That is normal and unavoidable; the flavour is sharp and lemony rather than the colour being the point.
- ChervilA small bunch means a handful of the fresh feathery herb, added for its faint anise note. It is rarely stocked; flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves is the nearest stand-in. Dried chervil is pointless here.
- The frying stageOnions, carrots and leeks browned in butter are the whole base of the soup, since there is no stock. Take them to a genuine light brown over medium heat, 10-12 minutes, before the water goes in.
- Cooking timeNone is given. Twenty-five to thirty minutes at a bare simmer is enough for the root vegetables to be soft; longer only dulls the sorrel.
- Sieve or blenderPressing through a sieve holds back the leek and lettuce fibres rather than chopping them, which is why it can feel silkier; if you blend, pass it through a fine sieve afterwards. Worth fishing out the bay leaf and thyme sprig first, though the recipe does not say to.
- Yield and servingAbout 6 cups on the water quantity suggested above, serving four as a first course. The recipe gives no garnish; a spoonful of cream or a poached egg is a common finish for French sorrel soups and would offset the acidity.