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Potage d'Oseille à la Parisienne
Ingredients.
Quarter of a pound of Sorrel after shredding.
Two ounces of Butter.
One pint of Béchamel.
Twenty-four small squares of Bread.
Wash and shred the sorrel. Melt the butter in a stewpan, and when hot put in the sorrel and cook about five minutes. Then add the Béchamel and boil the soup for about fifteen minutes.
Season to taste.
Put the squares of bread in the soup tureen and pour the soup over them.
A short recipe that assumes you already have a pint of béchamel standing by, which is what makes it a soup rather than a sauce. The whole dish turns on how briefly the sorrel is handled.
- Do not overcook the sorrelSorrel collapses into a purée within two or three minutes of hitting hot butter and turns from bright green to olive-khaki almost immediately. Five minutes is the outside limit; the fifteen-minute boil that follows is for the béchamel, so keep the heat low and stir, or the milk will catch on the base of the pan.
- Quarter of a pound after shreddingThat is about 115 g of shredded leaf; allow for the stems and ribs you discard, so rather more than that as bought or picked. Strip the leaves from the tough central ribs before you shred.
- Shred means chiffonadeStack the washed leaves, roll them into a cigar and cut across into fine ribbons. Sorrel bruises easily, so cut it just before cooking.
- Pan materialSorrel is high in oxalic acid and will pick up a metallic taste and grey colour from bare cast iron or untreated aluminium. Use stainless steel, enamelled iron or a well-tinned pan.
- BéchamelA pint here is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz or 570 ml, not the US 16 fl oz. A soup béchamel should be thinner than a coating sauce — around 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour to the pint — and it will thicken further as the sorrel purée goes in. Loosen with light stock or milk if it stiffens.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" here means salt and white pepper; a pinch of sugar to take the edge off the acid is a common treatment for sorrel. A little grated nutmeg suits the b chamel. Yolks beaten with cream, stirred in off the heat, are a common enrichment if you want one.
- The twenty-four squares of breadThese are cro utons: crustless bread cut into roughly half-inch dice and either fried in clarified butter or dried pale gold in a moderate oven. The recipe puts them dry in the tureen and pours the soup over them, so serve promptly or they go to pulp.
- YieldA pint of b chamel plus the cooked sorrel gives not much more than a pint and a half of finished soup — the twenty-four cro utons suggest four servings at six apiece, or fewer servings by modern portion sizes.
Sorrel was a standard kitchen-garden herb in Britain and France long before it became a specialist item, valued for the sharpness its oxalic acid gives — green sauce is a recorded dialect name for it, and it filled the role that lemon juice or vinegar plays now. French cookery kept it in far wider use than English, both as a purée served under fish and eggs and, as here, thinned with a white sauce into a potage. The name is a little loose: "à la Parisienne" was applied by nineteenth-century professional cooks to a whole range of preparations with no single defining feature, and in soups it may point to a smooth, mild, cream-finished treatment rather than any particular Paris origin, though the usage is inconsistent.