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Another Sorrel Soup
Take a tablespoonful of breadcrumbs, moisten them in milk in a pan, then add as much water as you require. Throw in three medium potatoes, a handful of well washed sorrel, and a sprig or two of chervil, a lump of butter, pepper, and salt. Bring to the boil, simmer for quarter of an hour, pass through a tammy, heat again for ten minutes and serve burning hot.
A thin, sharp spring soup thickened with nothing but bread and potato. The measurements are deliberately loose, so the two things worth fixing are the amount of liquid and the size of the potato dice.
- Liquid and yield"As much water as you require" is best read as about a quart, which with three potatoes gives four small bowls or three generous ones. Start the breadcrumbs in a few tablespoons of milk, then add water until it looks like a soup rather than a puree.
- Cut the potatoes smallFifteen minutes will not cook whole medium potatoes through. Dice them to about half an inch so they collapse in the time given and pass through the sieve without effort.
- TammyA tammy was a worsted straining cloth, used to force soup through into a smooth puree. A fine-mesh sieve and the back of a ladle does the same job; a blender followed by a quick pass through a sieve is faster and closer to the intended texture.
- A lump of butterRead as one to two tablespoons. It is doing the work of both fat and seasoning here, so do not cut it back.
- Sorrel behaves like a green, not a herbA handful means a good double handful of loose leaves, stems pulled off. It wilts to almost nothing and turns from bright green to a drab olive within a minute of hitting heat — that colour change is normal and not a fault.
- Chervil goes in late if you want it tastedChervil's aniseed note is volatile and largely gone after twenty-five minutes of simmering. Add the sprigs at the start as written for a background flavour, or hold a little back and stir it in during the final ten-minute reheat.
- Pan materialSorrel is high in oxalic acid and will pick up a metallic taste from bare cast iron or unlined aluminium. Use stainless steel or enamel.
- Serve burning hotTaken literally. There is no cream or egg yolk here, though the breadcrumbs are moistened in milk, so watch it if you return it to high heat right before serving. The second ten-minute heating may well be there to get it to the table hot.
Sorrel was a kitchen-garden staple across northern Europe long before lemons were cheap, and it did much the same job: a sour green that cut through butter, potato and fat. Belgian and French cookery used it in soups, in a puree under fish, and stewed with eggs, and it appears in this book alongside a first sorrel soup because it was a plant most households simply had, growing back through the spring faster than it could be picked. The Belgian Cook Book was compiled during the First World War, when Belgium was occupied and its recipes were gathered from refugees; the thrift here is not stylistic. A tablespoon of breadcrumbs and a splash of milk do the enriching work, and the soup still works, which is rather the point.