Sorrel Soup
salt and cayenne 1 tablespoon tomato catsup 2 eggs 1 cup cream 2 slices onion Cook onion and sorrel in butter five minutes, add water, cook thirty minutes. Cook milk and flour in double boiler twenty minutes, add cream, beaten eggs, catsup, and strained sorrel mixture. Season and serve. 2 cups milk 1 clove of garlic or
A velouté-style cream soup built on a milk-and-flour base, sharpened with sorrel and finished with beaten eggs. The whole thing turns on how the eggs and the acid are handled.
- Do not let it boil after the eggs go inBeaten whole eggs added to a hot milk base will curdle at a simmer. Temper them with a ladle of the hot soup, stir them back in off direct heat, and bring the pot no higher than about 175F.
- Sorrel and metalSorrel is high in oxalic acid, which reacts with bare iron and aluminium and turns the soup grey and metallic. Use stainless, enamelled or glass throughout, including the strainer.
- How much sorrelQuantities for the sorrel, butter, flour and water are not given here. Sorrel collapses like spinach — reckon a large packed bowl, roughly 6 to 8 oz of leaves, stems stripped, for a soup on 2 cups of milk plus a cup of cream.
- The white baseFor 2 cups of milk, 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour gives the body this method assumes. Twenty minutes in a double boiler is there to cook out the raw flour taste; a heavy saucepan over low heat with regular stirring does the same in ten.
- Acid meets milkSorrel purée and tomato catsup are both acidic and can flocculate hot milk. Add the strained sorrel mixture last, off the boil, and stir it in steadily rather than dumping it.
- CatsupBottled catsup of this period was generally thinner and more vinegar-forward than the modern product, which reads sweeter. A tablespoon of today's ketchup will taste sweeter; tomato paste loosened with a little vinegar is closer to the original intent.
- Garlic and onionTwo slices of onion are aromatic, not body; the garlic appears in the fragmentary ingredient line as '1 clove of garlic or', so it may be an alternative rather than an addition, and the method mentions only onion and sorrel in the butter. Cook the aromatics gently so they soften without colouring; the mixture is strained in any case.
- YieldThree cups from the milk and cream alone, plus whatever water the sorrel is cooked in, so nearer four cups — five or six small first-course servings. Serve at once; reheating past a simmer will break the egg liaison.
Sorrel soup belongs to a long European tradition — French soupe à l'oseille, Polish and Ukrainian szczaw and green borscht, all built on the same sharp, lemony leaf that appears in kitchen gardens well before the first spring greens. Sorrel was a common garden herb in nineteenth-century America and largely disappeared from grocers as commercial produce distribution took over, which is why the leaf now reads as exotic though the soup once did not. The finish here, with cream and beaten eggs whisked into a milk-and-flour base, is the standard cream-soup formula of American cookery schools of the period; Lowney's book, published by a chocolate company, was written in that Boston domestic-science idiom, where nearly every soup in the chapter resolves into the same white sauce with a different vegetable stirred through it.