Home › Soups with Meat, and Purees › Sorrel Soup
Sorrel Soup
Chop the sorrel very fine, and boil until tender in a quart of mutton stock. Rub through a colander and return to the fire. Thicken a pint of hot milk with a tablespoonful of flour rubbed into one of butter. Cook about a minute, then slowly stir in the sorrel soup. Season to taste and serve.
A simple two-part soup: sorrel stewed in stock and pushed through a sieve, then loosened with a light milk-and-flour liaison. The original gives no quantity for the sorrel, so judge by volume.
- How much sorrelNo amount is stated. For a quart of stock, figure roughly 8-12 oz of sorrel leaves, stemmed and packed tight; it collapses to almost nothing. Less than that and the soup tastes only of stock.
- Don't let it waitSorrel turns from bright green to olive-brown within a few minutes of heat, and there is no preventing it. Cook it briefly, sieve, finish, and serve. A soup held on the stove loses both colour and its clean acidity.
- Cooking time"Boil until tender" overstates it. Chopped sorrel is fully soft in 5 minutes; ten or fifteen minutes of boiling only dulls the flavour.
- The white sauceA tablespoon of flour rubbed into a tablespoon of butter is a beurre manie, worked in raw rather than cooked as a roux. Whisk it into the pint of hot milk off the boil, return to a simmer for a minute or two until it thickens and loses any raw-flour taste.
- Order of combiningFollow the direction as written and stir the sorrel puree into the thickened milk, not the reverse. Sorrel is acidic enough to curdle milk if the milk goes in cold or thin; a flour-bound milk is far more stable.
- Mutton stockRarely on sale now. Lamb stock is the direct substitute; a light chicken stock works and gives a milder soup. Skim the fat well, as mutton fat congeals unpleasantly as the soup cools.
- SievingA colander will pass only the coarsest puree. Use a fine sieve, or blend and then strain, unless you want a rustic texture.
- YieldThree pints finished, so four to six servings as a first course. Season generously with salt and white pepper; sorrel's sourness swallows a surprising amount of salt.
Sorrel (Rumex acetosa) was a kitchen-garden staple across Europe for centuries, valued precisely for the oxalic acid that makes its leaves sharp -- one of the cheaper sources of sourness available to a household with a garden. French cookery treated it seriously, in soupe a l'oseille and as the classic bed for shad, and Eastern and Central European kitchens kept it in green borschts and sour soups. The mutton stock is thoroughly Anglo-American, and belongs to a period when a leg of mutton might leave behind a stockpot as a matter of course. Sorrel is little used now partly because it does not ship or store -- it wilts within a day or two of cutting -- which is also why it survives mostly in gardens and farmers' markets rather than supermarkets.