Home › Salads and Salad Dressings › Sorrel Salad
Sorrel Salad
Scald and peel solid tomatoes, cut a slice from the stem ends, scoop out the centres, and put them on the ice to chill. Chop a handful of sheep sorrel, mix it with an equal quantity of cress, mushrooms, and mint, all chopped fine; fill the tomatoes with the mixture, stand them on nests of lettuce leaves, and pour French dressing over them.
Partridge berries may be substituted for the mushrooms.
A stuffed-tomato salad from the era when raw greens were gathered rather than bought. Everything hinges on the filling being chopped fine and the tomato shells being genuinely cold.
- Sheep sorrelRumex acetosella, a small wild sorrel with arrow-shaped leaves and a sharp lemon tang. Garden or French sorrel from a market is a fair stand-in; baby spinach with a squeeze of lemon will approximate the effect but not the bite. Sorrel is high in oxalic acid, so a handful in a salad is right and a bowlful is not.
- CressWatercress is the likely intent, though garden cress or upland cress works. Use leaves and tender stems only; thick watercress stalks stay stringy when raw.
- Raw mushroomsThe mushrooms go in uncooked, so use very fresh firm ones with closed caps and dice them small. Cultivated white or cremini are fine; if they have begun to darken and open, cook them for another dish instead.
- Partridge berriesThe suggested substitute is a foraged berry, most often Mitchella repens (partridgeberry) in the eastern United States, though the name was also applied to wintergreen and, in Newfoundland, to lingonberry. None is a supermarket item. Halved lingonberries or cranberries give a comparable tart red note if you want to try the variation.
- French dressingIn this period the term means a simple vinaigrette of oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, commonly given as roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name now.
- Scald and peelThirty to sixty seconds in boiling water, then straight into ice water, and the skins slip off. Do this before hollowing, not after, or the shells collapse.
- Chilling"Put them on the ice" means refrigerate the hollowed tomatoes until thoroughly cold, at least an hour. Salt the insides lightly and invert them to drain while they chill, or the released juice will thin the dressing.
- MintThe recipe's 'an equal quantity of cress, mushrooms, and mint' can be read either as that quantity in total or as equal parts of each; read the second way, it is a great deal of mint by modern taste. Reduce the mint and make up the volume with cress if you want the sorrel to lead.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Figure one tomato per person as a first course, two as a lunch salad.